Transcript for the Piece Audio version of tributary - word of the day

This is the etymology moment, and I'm Charles Hodgson. Today we'll hear the story behind the word tributary. Some years ago I took a canoe trip in the arctic. We paddled down a river called the Mara and then into another called the Burnside. So the Mara was a tributary of the Burnside. William Shakespeare used the word tributary with this meaning 400 years ago and he was the first to do so. But more than 200 years before that a tributary was someone who paid tribute. Today we hear all the time about one person paying tribute to another, but usually what this means is that they are paying them complements, not paying them money. When both the words tributary and tribute arrived into Middle English from French they had a meaning closer to paying tax. When one powerful nation took over another, the done thing was to demand tribute. So the poor underdogs would have to cough up valuables in order to keep peace with the conquering power. The word tribute relates also to the word contribute. When a charity hits you up for a contribution they too are asking for tribute. The con- part means "together" so that when you contribute you are paying with others. The original tribute was demanded by and paid to the Roman Empire and the reason it was called tribute was that it was for distribution among the tribes of Rome. So the word tribute grew out of the word tribe, but the word tribe itself is thought to have grown out of the ancestor of the word three. Some ascribe this to the idea that there were supposed to have been three hereditary peoples who populated Rome. These are said to have been the Latin, Sabine and Etruscan peoples. The Etruscans appear to have had a long and successful civilization before the establishment of the Roman Empire and the region of Tuscany in Italy bears a descendant of their name. The Sabine people may have gotten involved in the founding of Rome in a way that amounts to the ultimate tribute. The history is so far back that it's hard to be sure, but the legend goes that the guy who Rome is named after?Romulus?wanted to supply his troops with wives and to do it they invited the men folk from the surrounding territory in for a big party. These guys were the Sabine people and lived in the more mountainous regions north and east of Rome. While they were partying it up in town, Romulus' guys were rounding up all the Sabine women so they could start to produce little Romans. For some reason this legend has inspired sculptors and painters to produce great works of art. Abduction and forced motherhood seems a strange source of inspiration to me. Finally, the third and most recognizable of the three tribes, Latin survives in the name of the language that gave English so many words. But the word Latin may mean "flat land" and have been used in contrast to those hills where all those Sabine gals came from.
Thanks for listening, I?m Charles Hodgson.