tin

Word History: The origins of the word tin may date to a time before Western Europe was settled by speakers of Germanic, Celtic, and other branches of the Indo-European language family. Related words for this metal are found in almost all Germanic languages, such as German Zinn, Swedish tenn, and Old English tin (the source of the Modern English word). Together, these Germanic words suggest the reconstruction of a Proto-Germanic word *tinam, "tin," but no other branch of Indo-European language family has a word exactly comparable to this. Latin has a vaguely similar-sounding word for tin, stagnum (also spelled stannum), that may have been borrowed from a Celtic source. These facts suggest that the Germanic word for tin may originate in a pre-Indo-European language of Western Europe. This possibility is supported by the Bronze Age importation to the Near East of tin and copper from Western Europe. There are relatively few rich deposits of tin in the earth's crust, and production of bronze in the ancient world was limited by the availability of tin. During the Bronze Age, the civilizations of the Near East and the Mediterranean area depended on relatively few sources to provide the tin needed to make bronze. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the 1st century bc, explains that much ancient tin came from deposits in Cornwall in Britain. From there, it was shipped through Gaul to supply the rest of the Mediterranean world. At the time when the early Indo-European peoples began to move westward from their homelands in Eastern Europe—sometime after 4000 bc—they had probably just mastered early techniques of bronze production, in which arsenic rather than tin is alloyed with copper. Tin, however, makes a much superior kind of bronze, and the early Indo-European peoples may have borrowed words for tin from local peoples who were already trading in tin ingots or working the tin deposits of Western Europe.