The Ancient Greek word ballein meant “to throw”. This ancient word is preserved in Modern English in our word ballistic, as used in the case of “ballistic missiles”, where ballistic signifies “relating to projectiles or their flight”. Ballein is also connected to the modern English word problem, which comes via Latin and French from Greek problema “something put or thrown forward, something proposed, a task, a question an issue to be tackled;” from the verb proballein, from pro+ballein “to throw forward, propose”.
Ballein is also believed to have been the origin of the name of the Balearic Islands, whose inhabitants apparently had a reputation among Ancient Greek navigators for employing catapults or slingshots as weapons, and were widely employed in Greek armies and then Roman armies for their skills with these weapons. Greek Baliarikos became Latin Balearicus, and, first appearing in print in 1661, English Balearic.
The Balearic Islands are the western Mediterranean archipelago which lies to the east of the mainland Iberian Peninsula. The indigenous language of these islands is Catalan, with island-to-island dialectal variants which go by names such as Menorquin in Menorca, Mallorquin in Majorca, and Eivissenc in Ibiza.
The Balearic islands whose names will probably be best known to readers of this column, often perhaps in their capacity as holiday destinations, are Mallorca (its English-language name is Majorca), Menorca (which is called Minorca in Spanish), Eivissa (the Spanish-language name is Ibiza, which is also the variant of the name best known to English speakers; and Formentera (whose name comes from Latin frumentarium “grain store”).
Majorca and Minorca are the two largest Balearic islands. Many people will have supposed that it is not a coincidence that the names of these islands contain the linguistic elements “major” and “minor” – and they are indeed correct in this supposition: Majorca really is rather larger – about five times larger – than Minorca. And the Catalan names do actually mean, respectively, “the larger one” and “the smaller one”.
The name Eivissa, on the other hand, seems to derive from Arabic Yabisah “dry land”, “landward”, but was probably an Arabised form of a Phoenician word.
As this mention of the Arabic language suggests, the islands have not always been Catalan-speaking. Eivissa is about 150 nautical miles from the north African coast of Algeria, and it is therefore not too surprising to learn that it has, over the centuries, been occupied, like Carthage, by speakers of the Semitic language, Phoenician, and later on by Islamic peoples speaking Berber and Arabic dialects.
Catalan is one of the major Romance languages which have descended into modern times from Classical Latin alongside Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Occitan, French, Italian, Sardinian and Romanian, as well as many other less widely known languages and dialects.
Well-known Catalan speakers include Salvador Dalí, the world-renowned surrealist painter; the painter Joan Miró (the male forename Joan is the Catalan equivalent of Spanish Juan and Portuguese João); Antoni Gaudí, the noted architect; Josep Carreras, the famous tenor singer; and Josep “Pep” Guardiola, the current manager of Manchester City Football Club.
Rafael Nadal, the Spanish tennis star who won 22 Grand Slam titles, is a native of Mallorca and grew up speaking Mallorquin. If you look at his Facebook page, you can see that he sometimes posts in Catalan.
CATAPULT
Catapults, when I was a boy, were weapons which we were discouraged from making. They consisted of a forked stick with an elastic band fastened to the two prongs, which was used for shooting small stones and similar objects. The word comes from Ancient Greek katapeltis, from kata “against” plus ballein or pallein “to throw”.
