Caesars, Tsars, and Shahs

Cognates are words that share a common origin. These etymological origin stories can go back thousands of years, and they can tell you a lot about a culture and the people who used the word.

You might already know that the word czar (or tzar, or tsar) comes from the word caesar.

You can certainly see how this word could drift from a word the Romans pronounced as something like kai-sarrr, with that rolled R at the end, and a hard S in the middle. That’s a bit of a mouthful, so Slavic peoples eventually shortened the word to tsar, and the Russian title of tsar (or czar) reflects the familiar phenomenon of linguistic drift into more comfortable, simpler sounds.

Before it became a title, though, it was a name. Julius Caesar’s family was called the gens Iulia—remember that the Latin alphabet had the letter I, but no J, so the Iulia was pronounced much closer to the modern Julia than you might first think. Gens means people, and you can see that word all over the English language today in places like generation or generally.

The Julian people had a prominent nickname in their family. Back then, family branches could be complicated and hard to trace and track, so some lines of the Julian line began to use Caesar at the end to describe this particular familial subset.

Long before it was a name of a family, the root word for caesar may have been in use all over the Mediterranean world for centuries. I say may have been in use, because the PIE (Proto-Indo-European) origins aren’t clear with this word.

The leading candidates are *kʷeys-, pronounced something like kways to modern English-listening ears and meaning “to cut”; and *ker-, which means something like head or horn. There’s plenty of speculation that one of these led to the family name Caesar, but nobody is really sure.

What is clear is when and how the word switched back from a proper name to a regular old noun once again.

Once Julius Caesar had been forcefully removed from power, his nephew Octavian won the ensuing power struggle. When he ascended to leadership, he took on the name of his revered uncle and started calling himself Augustus Caesar, or the great caesar. This was a smart political play for Augustus. It quickly legitimized the near-total power he had just seized, paving the way for a century of relative peace for Rome.

Caesar quickly became associated with the top leadership position, and that meaning has stuck right up into the modern era.

It was Kaiser Wilhelm whom the allies demonized and fought against during the first World War. Tsars in Russia ruled right up until the Russian Revolution in 1917, and their use of a word derived from caesar was a clear proclamation that Russia was the logical successor of Rome and Constantinople.

There’s one other word that comes from the same place as Caesar, but unlike tsar, czar, kaiser, and so on, this word doesn’t derive from the Roman family name. Instead, it comes from the same earlier word that Caesar comes from.

The word is shah.

In Persian, the word shah means king. This has been the case for thousands of years, and a shah ruled the nation of Iran (the successor of Persia) right up until 1979.

Now, shah and caesar went their separate ways very early on. What I mean by that is that the PIE root word *kʷeys- (“kways”) came to mean “top leadership position” very early on, still retaining its many-thousands year old meaning. Meanwhile, caesar took the much more circuitous route described above.

Language can be both direct and circuitous, and I find it even more notable that this particular root word made such a wide circle. One version of an ancient word went off and became someone’s name, then transformed into a title. The other version became a title and stayed that way.

Did you know about the czar/caesar connection? How about the shah/tsar/czar/kaiser connection?

Are there any other cool cognates you know of?