Nothing: A Hungarian Etymology

'Landing', 2013. Grateful acknowledgement to Sadradeen Ameen

Posted by Király V. István

In its primary – and abstract – appearance, nothing is precisely 'that' 'which' it is not. However, its word is still there in the words of most languages (for we cannot know all). Here we explore its primary meaning in Hungarian.

The Hungarian word for nothing, 'semmi' is a compound of the conjunction 'sem' (nor) and the personal pronoun 'mi' (we). The negative 'sem' expresses 'nor here' (sem itt), 'nor there' (sem ott), 'nor then' (sem akkor), 'nor me' (sem én), 'nor him or her' (sem ő), etc. That is: I or we have searched everywhere, yet I or we have found nothing, nowhere, never.

However much we think about it: the not to which the 'sem' sends is not
the negating 'Not', nor the depriving 'Not' that Heidegger revealed in his analysis of 'das Nichts'. The Not in the 'sem' is a searching Not! It says, in fact, that searching, we have not found. By this, it says that the way we met, faced,
and confronted the Not is actually a search. Thus the 'sem' places the negation in the mode of search, and the search into the mode of Not (that is, negation).

What does all this mean in its essence? Firstly, it means that, although the 'sem' is indeed a kind of search, which 'flows into' the Not, still, as a search, it
always distinguishes itself from the not-s it faces and encounters. For searching is never simply a repeated question, nor the repetition of a question, but a question carried around. Therefore the 'sem' is always about more than the tension between the question and the negative answer given to it. For the negation itself – the Not – is placed into the mode of search! And conversely.

Therefore the 'sem' never negates the searching itself – only places and fixes it in its deficient modes. Those in which it 'does not find' in any direction. This way, the 'sem' charges, emphasizes, and outlines the Not, but also stimulates the search, until the exhaustion of its final emptiness. Therefore the contextually experienced Not – that is, the 'sem' – is actually nothing but an endless deficiency of an emptied, exhausted, yet not suspended search.

This ensures, on the one hand, the stability of the 'sem', which is inclined to
hermetically close up within itself – while on the other hand it also ensures an inner impulse for the search which, emanating from it, continues to push it to its emptiness.

And it is in the horizon of this emanating impulse that the 'sem' merges with the pronoun 'mi', in the Hungarian name for nothing. The 'mi' in Hungarian is at the same time an interrogative pronoun and the first person plural personal pronoun. Whether or not this phonetic identity is a 'coincidence', it conceals important speculative possibilities which should not be overlooked. For the 'Mi' pronoun, with the 'Sem' negative, always says that it is 'we' (Mi) who questioningly search, but find 'nothing' (semmi).

Merged in their common space, the 'sem' and the 'mi' signify that the questioners, in the grip of the plurality of their searching questions, facing the meaning of the 'semmi', only arrived at, and ran into the not, the negation.

In the space of its articulation the Hungarian word of the nothing offers a
deeper and more articulated consideration of what it 'expresses', fixing not only the search and its – deficient – modes, but also the fact that it is always we who search and question, even if we cannot find ourselves in 'that', in the Nothing. That is to say, the Nothing – in one of its meanings – is precisely our strangeness, foreignness, and unusualness, which belongs to our own self – and therefore all our attempts to eliminate it from our existence will always be superfluous.

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Király V. István is an Associate Professor in the Hungarian Department of Philosophy of the Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania. This post is an extract selected by the Editors, and adjusted for Pi, from his bilingual Hungarian-English Philosophy of The Names of the Nothing.