Back to the Origins of Space and Place

This article is especially focused on the etymology and semantics of the words space, and place; it is the prosecution of the previous article – What Is Place? What Is Space? – so that everybody can have a first, basic, idea of the linguistic histories of those two words and the associated meanings.

There are a few points I would like to touch upon briefly to introduce the argument: the first regards the temporal succession through which the concepts of space and place appeared in the history of human knowledge. It is a voyage back to Greek and Latin sources, with the ultimate intent to verify if it is possible to get some insight from the analysis of the Proto-Indo-European language – the ancestral language that it was supposed to be spoken in the late Neolithic period in European and Eastern regions – whence the Greek and Latin languages descended.^[1] I will start by taking into consideration what it seems to be the more recent, and, apparently, the more easily traceable history of the two concepts: space. Then I will try to reason about ‘place’, whose history is possibly older than ‘space’. At least, this is also what Albert Einstein believed: in his well-known foreword to Max Jammer’s book – Concepts of Space – Einstein speculated about the historical precedence of the concept of place with respect to the concept of space, and I believe Einstein’s hypothesis was especially due to the logical assumption that terms and concepts that have a strong connection to the physical world (this seems to be the case for the conceptualization behind the term ‘place’) have a temporal precedence with respect to those analogous conceptualizations that seem to be more abstract, such as the conceptualization behind the term space. In that foreword, Einstein says: ‘Now, as to the concept of space, it seems that this was preceded by the psychologically simpler concept of place.’ ^[2]

The second consideration concerns the special care needed when relating modern concepts of space and place to the Greek and Latin terms from which we assume they derive. We cannot expect one-to-one correspondences. For instance, the English space and its Latin cognate spatium are linked etymologically, but not semantically: our use of space to indicate a four-dimensional continuum or a background ‘arena of events’ would have been unthinkable in antiquity, long before Descartes or Newton. When Vitruvius employed spatium in De Architectura (1st century BC), he did not mean what a modern architect means by ‘space’, understood as a coherent system of three dimensions constituting a background for physical bodies (the so-called background space). I showed that in a specific article.^[3] Ancient people certainly perceived themselves as immersed in a continuum, but they related to it differently: less as an abstract container and more as a material continuum bound to bodies. For them, the preference for being over non-being made it alien to conceive of space as a separate, empty dimensionality, with few remarkable exceptions.^[4]

This distinction suggests that the modern concept of space (having dimensional, abstract, and mathematical origins) and the ancient idea of a material continuum stand on different ontological levels: one actual and concrete, the other ideal and abstract. My position, therefore, is that the term space, with its modern meanings, is not the right word to describe the continuum of antiquity. The modern notion grew from mathematical abstraction, whereas the ancient continuum was relational and bodily. Thus, even where there is a clear etymological link — as between space and spatium — we cannot assume a direct correspondence of meaning. The same caution applies equally to the term place.

Even further back in time, the modern idea of space proves still more alien to Greek thought, the true foundation of Western philosophy. If the Latin spatium provides an etymological ancestor for space, the semantic gap between Latin and Greek spatial — or, more precisely, place-related — terms is even wider.^[5] To impose a modern concept on an ancient word risks not only historical or philological error, but also a methodological anachronism.

In Latin, discussions of space and place were usually conducted with the terms spatium and locus. By analogy, one might suspect that the Greeks employed cognate terms such as stadion or plateia, from which English space and place appear etymologically derived. But this is not the case: the primary Greek words were chōra and topos, as Australian philosopher Jeff Malpas observed.^[6] The contrast reinforces an important point: the semantic gap between English, Latin, and Greek cannot be bridged by simple one-to-one translation. Instead, a range of explorations — linguistic, philological, historical, philosophical, mathematical, and even architectural — is required to approach the meanings of space and place across epochs.

Just as it is a mistake to equate space directly with spatium, so too it is misleading to assume chōra translates as ‘space’ and topos as ‘place.’ As Dutch professor of Ancient and Medieval philosophy Keimpe Algra shows in Concepts of Space in Greek Thought, and Malpas stresses in Place and Experience, there is no such warrant.^[7] In early sources, chōra and topos sometimes appear interchangeable, even synonymous. The safest guide to establish their correct meaning, Algra notes, is always the context in which the term is used.^[8]

In light of these considerations, a third crucial issue arises: whether space and place should be seen as inherently connected notions. This possibility deserves brief discussion.

We have already noted that in classical Greek culture the terms chōra and topos were employed in contexts we would now call questions of ‘space’ and ‘place.’ There is, however, a widespread habit of translating chōra as space and topos as place. As Algra and Malpas point out, the philological validity of this equivalence is highly questionable. If we nevertheless accept this tacit translation, we immediately fall into a conundrum: written sources show that chōra appears earlier than topos. This would suggest that the supposedly more abstract notion of space precedes the ‘psychologically simpler concept of place’ (Einstein’s phrase) — in apparent contradiction with the logical sequence we outlined earlier.

The contradiction dissolves once we look more carefully at usage. In Homer and Aeschylus, Professor Algra notes, chōra almost always means ‘land, region, or ground’ — in other words, something concrete and place-like, not abstract and space-like.^[9] When topos appears in later sources, it is often used synonymously with chōra, Algra continues.^[10] Thus, the evidence confirms our earlier hypothesis: historically, concrete words and concepts precede abstract ones. Algra even speaks of the promiscuous use of chōra and topos to denote similar concrete situations.^[11]

Yet the philological record also reveals something more subtle. The earliest chōra carries not only a concrete sense — a locale, plot of ground, or specific region — but also, at times, a more figurative sense that hints at extension, stretch, or dimensionality.^[12] This second sense, closer to the idea of pure extension (extensio), gestures toward what we would call space. Already in Homer, a few passages in the Iliad and Odyssey contain traces of this more abstract meaning.^[13]

The result is a twofold question. Within the single word chōra we may discern two semantic natures:

• a concrete, intensive sense (chōra-as-place): land, region, position, the intensive character of an actual locale;
• a figurative, extensive sense (chōra-as-space): dimensional extension, stretch, the abstract possibility of future occupancy.

When topos enters the vocabulary, it begins to share this semantic field, sometimes overlapping with chōra, sometimes helping to differentiate between these two aspects. But originally, both the concrete and abstract resonances were contained within chōra itself.^[14]

When topos appears in later sources, it too carries both senses: a concrete locale (topos-as-place) and an abstract extension (topos-as-space).^[15] Thus the ambiguity between space and place originates not in modern misuse, but in the very structure of the ancient terms. This ‘con-fusion’ should be taken as a positive fact: the starting point for any successive elucidation of the terms and not a free pass to use our modern concepts of space and place interchangeably across different domains, or, even worst, a free pass to transpose our modern concepts into the old words, without taking into consideration any historical, philological, philosophical, or even mathematical, related questions. Then, this ‘con-fusion’ marks the original interconnection of placial and spatial notions — whether expressed as chōra and topos, spatium and locus, or space and place. As Malpas notes, ‘consideration of the vocabulary of place and space alone is indicative of the way these are part of a network in which each term is inextricably embedded… although there is a strong temptation to try to develop a set of clearly differentiated and independent concepts, and, in particular, to try to develop a notion of place that is clearly separated off from any concept of space, this temptation is one that ought to be resisted.’^[16]

My own proposal builds directly on this point. The revised notions of place and space I aim to develop here depend on reinterpreting their original interdependence. I trace their mutual relation to the simultaneous presence of two levels of understanding within the ancient terms: the concrete and actual (place), and the abstract and ideal (space—the dimensionality inherent in places). Space and place thus form two poles of a single structure that explains phenomena across the continuum of reality — from the concrete and actual to the abstract and ideal or possible.^[17]

The consequence is this: whenever we elucidate one notion, we must adjust the other. If place is taken as the concrete, the arena of things, space must play a complementary role, which I call the arena of thought. It is because every concrete locale carries both an intensive character (a determinate region, land, or position) and an extensive character (dimensional stretch coupled to it) that abstraction can emerge as the complement of concreteness. Otherwise said: in place, or from place, space emerges as its abstract complement. For this reason, I take place as the founding principle of reality, a principle that always already contains two natures: the concrete and the abstract. This duality recalls the original Greek chōra — and especially its Platonic interpretation — which will serve as a key reference in my discussion of place and space throughout this project at RSaP. Even in the modern attribute ‘choral,’ which etymologically derives from chōra, we still hear the echo of that original unity-in-plurality.^[18]

To conclude this introduction, I think it is interesting to verify how those two different natures contained within a single word — one more abstract and relative to ‘extension’, the other more concrete, and relative to ‘presence and localization’ — developed into different Greek and Latin terms, and then into modern languages. I also think it may be interesting to see if those ancient designations can be traced further back to an original common source: the Proto-Indo-European language, the reconstructed language whence the Greek and the Latin languages developed from. This research of mine into language is mostly a suggestion for further investigations in the semantic field related to spatial terminology and notions.

Image 1: Partial tree diagram of the Indo-European family (from Merritt Ruhlen).^[19]

1. On the Etymology of the Word ‘Space’

As in the previous article, I begin with a reliable etymological account of the word ‘space’ given by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). According to the OED,^[20] as well as other sources such as the Oxford Concise Dictionary of English Etymology (OCDEE),^[21] the English ‘space’ is an ‘adaptation of the Old French espace (aspace, espasse, spaze, etc., French espace = Provencal espaci, espazi, Portuguese espaco, Spanish espacio, Italian spazio)’, which is, in turn, an ‘adaptation of the Latin spatium (medieval Latin also spacium).’^[20] The English term space is traced back to the Latin ‘spatium’, ultimately.

Two observations follow. First, no explicit connection is made by the OED (or the OCDEE) between the Latin spatium or spacium and any corresponding Greek term. This aligns with the well-attested fact that the ancient Greeks had no single word for ‘space’ in our modern sense (see note 5), and thus no directly equivalent concept. Second, it becomes risky to press for secure connections between the Latin, the Greek, and hypothetical Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots, even though such attempts have been made.

Indeed, British philologist Hensleigh Wedgwood’s 19th-century Dictionary of English Etymology also confirms the derivation from Latin, without reference to Greek or PIE antecedents.^[22] But linguist Ernest Klein, in A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, goes further: he traces Middle English space (via Old French espace) to Latin spatium, itself probably derived from the PIE roots *spe(i)- or *sp-, meaning ‘to draw, stretch, span, spread, extend, swell, be successful.’ From these roots, the Greek verb spáō (σπάω, meaning ‘to draw, to tear, to pull, to drag aside’, according to Liddel and Scott ) may also descend.^[23]

This is a suggestive genealogy: we are going to see soon that this root is probably the ultimate source of meaning for ‘space’. It situates its origins not in an abstract geometrical realm but in concrete practices tied to agriculture and, later, to bodily exertion: from there, the notion of spatium as ‘extent,’ ‘stretch,’ or ‘interval’ naturally extends into uses for racing grounds (stadion, the name for the Olympic race-course), then for measures of length (stadion, the unit of distance), and finally for the pure dimensionality we associate with space today.

1.2 Vertical and Horizontal Connections Between Languages

Regardless of their specific relevance, I take Klein’s observations as pointing to an important distinction in reconstructing the origins of words. Beyond the vertical or ‘genetic’ relations between languages (as Klein suggests), we must also take into account horizontal, historical factors—namely, the reciprocal socio-cultural influences between different peoples living in the same period. Put differently: even if Greek and Latin share a plausible common linguistic root, how did concrete historical interactions—trade, migration, cultural contact—reshape the history, form, and meaning of words?

Relative to the tree diagram represented in Image 1, this means that alongside explicit vertical transmissions between languages (and thus between words), there may also exist horizontal (or external) relations, depending on the degree of contact between cultures. Such horizontal connections could have influenced the adoption of terms, altered their structure, or shifted their meaning. This seems especially relevant for concepts as fundamental and cross-cultural as space and place.

A similar phenomenon is evident today: English is reshaping many European languages by generating hybrid terms. In Italian we find forms like brandizzato, customizzare, taggare, sponsorizzazione; in Spanish, analogous coinages proliferate.^[24] These cases show how a network of meanings can spread across linguistic boundaries, forming genealogies that are not linear but reticulated. While such hybridizations are relatively easy to trace in the present, it is far more difficult to reconstruct analogous interconnections between ancient languages without falling into speculation. This is especially true for ubiquitous and polysemic concepts such as space and place, and given the deep linguistic, social, and cultural gaps between the Proto-Indo-European, Greek, and Latin worlds.

To be fully elucidated, such differences require more than purely linguistic analysis: they call for converging approaches—philological, philosophical, archaeological, anthropological, mathematical, even architectural—capable of capturing how words and concepts shift within a living historical network.

1.3 From the Greek ‘Spadion’ (or ‘Stadion’) to the Latin ‘Spatium’: Historical, Etymological, and Philosophical Argumentations

With respect to the etymology of the English term space represented in Image 2 below, this is only one among several possibilities I encountered during my etymological survey of the concepts of space and place. While the Latin descent of the English space (through Old Latin spatium and Medieval Latin spacium) is unanimously accepted, I now turn to the frequently proposed hypothesis of a Greek origin for the Latin spatium. There are in fact several indications that suggest a Greek rather than a purely Proto-Indo-European descent: historical evidence, etymological parallels, and even philosophical considerations support this view. Nevertheless, in a later section I will also examine the role of the reconstructed PIE roots, since they remain important for understanding the broader network of meanings in which conceptualizations of space and place are embedded.

Image 2: Vertical and horizontal transmissions between languages.

From the history books we know that the peoples of the Italian peninsula, and particularly the Latins of Latium (the region around Rome, founded in the 8th century BC), had extensive contact with the Greeks. The southern part of Italy was colonized by Greeks from the 8th century BC onward—a region later known as Magna Graecia. Inevitably, such close contact led to borrowings and mixtures of customs, practices, and language. It is therefore not surprising that the Romans, whose language was Latin, adopted Greek terms.

For instance, Theodor Mommsen, in his History of Rome, describes how Greek influence shaped Roman festivals and competitions: ‘just as the reform of the (Roman) constitution took place under the Greek influence, the city-festival may have been at the same time so far transformed as to combine Greek races with, and eventually to a certain extent to substitute them for, an older mode of amusement, the “leap” – triumpus (…). Moreover, while there is some trace of the use of the war-chariot in actual warfare in Hellas, no such trace exists in Latium. Lastly, the Greek term “stadion” – Doric “spadion”- was at a very early period transferred to the Latin language, retaining its signification, as “spatium”… It thus appears that (…) the Romans were indebted to them for the fruitful idea of gymnastic competition.”^[26]

This cultural backdrop of ceremonial events and athletic races is crucial for tracing the history of space back to the Greek world. The Greek stadion (or spadion) denoted both a racecourse and the distance to be run (a unit of length), as well as the place of assembly where the event occurred. Latin borrowed both the term and its associated meanings, transforming them into stadium and spatium. Yet the process was not a mere translation; new nuances emerged in the passage from Greek into Latin, reflecting broader cultural and conceptual shifts.

Different etymological dictionaries confirm this connection between Greek and Latin. Edward Ross Wharton, in his Etyma Latina, An Etymological Lexicon of Classical Latin, explains that spatium derives from an Etruscan form spadium (a hypothetical reconstructed Latin form), itself borrowed from the Greek Aeolic spadion, a variant of the Attic stadion. Similarly, Francis Edward Jackson Valpy, in his Etymological Dictionary of the Latin Language, defines spatium—‘a race ground, a place to walk in, space, room, size’—as deriving from spadium, connected with the Aeolic Greek spadion, a derivative of stadion.^[28] Regardless of the precise reliability of the intermediary form spadium, the semantic and phonetic affinity between Latin spatium and the Greek Aeolic/Doric spadion (with stadion as the Attic form) is undeniable.

1.3.2 The Various Meanings of ‘Stadion’ (or ‘Spadion’): Standard of Length, Footrace, and Place of Assembly

Apart from its meaning as the footrace itself, the Greek stadion (or spadion) also designated a standard unit of length in both Greek and Roman societies. As the Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary and Greek Lexicon (1849) explains, the stadion—στάδιον—was ‘a race-course for foot-racing, so named because the famous course at Olympia measured exactly one stade, which contained 600 Greek feet.’^[29] The historian Herodotus (5th century BC) likewise records that one stadion was equal to 600 Greek feet.^[30] Yet because different regions of the Greek and Roman worlds used different ‘feet,’ the precise length of a stadion varied considerably.^[31]

Image 3: The Stadion of Nemea in the region of Peloponnese, Greece.

Image 4: Semantic and Etymological connections between the English term ‘space’, the Greek words ‘spadion/spatium’ and the Latin ‘stadion/stadium’.

Now, I want to deal with a question that may seem irrelevant, but I believe it is not, since it may contribute to elucidate the etymological and semantic relation, between ‘space’, ‘spatium’ and ‘spadion/stadion’ as well as the sense of those terms. The input for such argumentation is offered by the following questions: What is primary in the meaning of stadion—the racecourse, the unit of length, or the physical construction of the stadium itself? Did the habitual racecourse give its name to the unit of length and to the architectural site? Or did an existing unit of measure provide the designation for the course and its venue? It seems to me this is not a fixed question since during my research I’ve been through different hypotheses. I discuss it here.

As we have seen, we know from many attested sources that the ‘stadion’ was the name of the race-course performed since at least the 8^th century B.C. (the Olympic Games were traditionally founded in 776 B.C.).^[32] Later authors such as Herodotus, Polybius, Pliny the Elder, and Cassius Dio all speak of the stadion as a measure of length, though none directly address the origin of the term.^[33] Strikingly, Homer and Hesiod—our earliest Greek poets—do not use stadion at all as a unit of measure. Instead, as William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities records, Homer employs other length-units: ‘δῶρον’ (palm), ‘ποῦς’ (foot), ‘πυγών’ (short cubit—elbow to end of knuckles of closed fist), ‘ὄργυια’ (fathom, stretch of both arms) and ‘πλέθρον’ (breadth of the ‘γύης’, a land measure equivalent to an acre).^[34]

Hesiod, moreover, explicitly defines the ‘γύης’ as ‘the curved piece of wood in a plough to which the share was fitted’, while Homer seems to use the term γύης, in compound forms, as units of surface measure.^[35] From this agrarian context it is only a short step to the hypothesis that the system of land measurement influenced the formation of other units of length, including the stadion. As Smith’s Dictionary observes, the γύης referred to ‘the amount of ground that could be ploughed in one day’s work by a yoke of oxen,’ and by analogy ‘it is probable that the stadion represented the furrow-long, i.e. the distance which a yoke of oxen could drag, and a man could steer, the plough without a rest.’^[36]

it is probable that the ‘stadion’ represented the furrow-long [that is] the distance which a yoke of oxen could drag, and a man could steer, the plough without a rest.

More succinctly, The Oxford Classical Dictionary says that the ‘stadion’, in the origin, was ‘the distance covered by a single draught by the plough.’^[37]

Image 5: Origin of the Greek term ‘stadion’ and its relation to other units of length based on the standard measures of the human body.

Since neither Homer nor Hesiod mention stadion as a unit of measure, it seems more plausible to interpret the stadion as a later attribution of an older, more archaic measure—one that originally arose, as A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities observes, ‘out of the measures of surface, which must of necessity be employed from a very early period in every civilized community for determining the boundaries of land.’^[38] The same source also notes that ‘the old name for the στάδιον (stadion) was αὖλος (aulos),’ suggesting that the designation stadion only gained currency at a later stage—roughly the period in which athletic games became widespread as ritual celebrations of civic or sacred events.

This hypothesis aligns with William Martin Leake’s argument in his paper On the Stade as a Linear Measure, presented to the Royal Geographical Society in 1838. Leake writes: ‘As the stade could not have been introduced to common use as a measure until long after the establishment of the sacred games, we are not surprised to find, even so late as the time of Herodotus, traces of the earlier custom of describing distances in the ‘ὄργυια’, or fathom, the longest of the Greek measures before the stadion was introduced.’ ^[39]

A fuller explanation of how early measurement systems operated is provided in the first edition of A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1859), under the lemma ‘Mensura’. There we read that while all systems ultimately require a fixed unit of reference—typically derived from a familiar and constant bodily standard such as a palm, foot, or cubit— ‘at an early period, the larger measures were not derived artificially from the smaller, but were taken from distances which occur in nature and ordinary life…’; this is possibly the case for ‘the length of the Olympic foot-race-course, or Stadium, after which all the other Greek stadia were measured out, and which thus formed a universally familiar standard of reference for itinerary measurement… the point now insisted upon is that when an early Greek writer expressed a distance in stadia, he did not mean to suggest to his readers the idea of so many times 600 feet, but of so many times the length of the actual objective Olympic stadium, with which they were all familiar.”^[40] This is a crucial insight: what we now regard as an ‘abstract’ unit of distance was originally grounded in very concrete references—parts of the body, a furrow drawn by oxen, or the length of a physical stadion where races were run and watched. From an architectural perspective, it seems implausible that the building itself could have given its name to the race or the unit of length. More likely, the stadion as a footrace logically preceded the stadion as a built structure. At the same time, it is reasonable to suppose that the physical stadium helped stabilize and popularize the measure, by providing a fixed and universally recognized standard of reference. In this sense, William Smith’s general argument—that measurement systems emerge from lived, shared practices rather than pure abstraction—seems both logical and consistent with the earliest sources.

We may conclude, then, that although the basic unit of length related to ploughing practices had existed since the earliest agrarian communities, the name stadion was only later attributed to it, once the footrace and its dedicated venue had become central sociocultural phenomena in ancient Greece. But why should that race-course have been set at precisely that distance rather than another?

A first and most pragmatic hypothesis is that the length of the ploughed acre-strip—the distance a yoke of oxen (or mules) could draw the plough in a single draught—was so deeply imprinted on the agrarian imagination that it became a natural standard. Indeed, similar ratios between length and breadth of acre strips are found in Greek, English, and Irish land systems alike.^[41] To the founding question, ‘How long shall the runners race?’ a ‘Homeric’ answer seems ready at hand: ‘As far off as is the range of mules in ploughing.’^[42] This interpretation is reinforced by the addition of the diaulos to the Olympic program in 724 BC: a race twice the length of the stadion, consisting of a sprint down and back the length of the track.^[43] As Professor of Classics Stephen Miller observes in Ancient Greek Athletics, this mirrored precisely the back-and-forth motion of ploughing a field by oxen, or mules.^[44] Here we are reminded of the aulos—the older name of the stadion—meaning ‘channel, pipe, or furrow’: the very trace left by the plough.

A second, more symbolic dimension appears in the numerical articulation of the stadion as a standard unit that gathers together humans, the earth, and animals in an archaic and divine practice (agriculture). The stadion corresponded exactly to 100 orgyiai (ὀργυιαί), or 100 stretches of the arms. This ‘square’ number may help explain why it was chosen for the premier Olympic contest. The echo is felt even today: the modern Olympic Games still crown their fastest runner in the 100-meter dash, an unconscious heir to the archaic logic of 100 orgyiai.

Finally, a third, more cosmic hypothesis links the stadion to the movements of the heavens. As reported in the 1891 edition of A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (Vol II, 1891, page 162), Brandis held that the Babylonians defined the stadion through equinoctial time (i.e., the time the sun takes to traverse its own diameter during the equinox): the sun traverses thirty diameters per hour, or one diameter every two minutes—the same distance that a man can walk in that span, that is, one stadion! In this way, the stadion unites earth (the furrow), mortals (the runner), divinities (the sacred games), and sky (the sun’s course). It becomes, in Heideggerian terms, a concrete instantiation of the ‘fourfold’: an abstract measure born from embodied human, divine, and cosmic practices. An abstract expression of concrete practices.

Image 6:  Panathinaiko Stadio, Athen, Greece.

Image 7: ‘Estádio Municipal de Braga’ (Portugal), architect Eduardo Souto Moura, 2003.

The stadion, originally a unit of length used by the Greeks to measure both terrestrial and astronomical distances, eventually migrated into Latin as spatium (later spacium), whence the English space. This semantic passage is not trivial: I suspect that its astronomical applications—the measurement of the Earth’s circumference, or the distances to the Moon and Sun—played a decisive role in endowing spatium with the sense of ‘immeasurable expanse’ that still informs our modern definition of space.^[45]

As Mommsen already noted, the frequent contacts between Greeks and Romans facilitated the borrowing of both terms—spadion/stadion into spatium/stadium.^[46] Their strong phonetic affinity confirms the borrowing, but more important is the differentiation of meanings that followed. Whereas stadium preserved the sense of a race-course and place of assembly, spatium took on broader connotations of extension and interval, both terrestrial and celestial. At this stage we witness a stratification of meanings: from a ploughed furrow or stretch of ground, to regions of land or sky, and ultimately to the infinite expanse available upward, downward, and everywhere ad infinitum. In this sense spatium anticipated our modern “space” as a container of all distances.

With this shift, the Latin spatium came to encompass within a single word two distinct Greek notions: diastema (διάστημα, interval, extension)^[47] and chōra (χώρα, room, extent where bodies move).^[48] The passage from Greek stadion/spadion (a concrete extension tied to the verb spao, σπάω, ‘to draw’) to Latin spatium represents not only a translation but also a conceptual deepening: what began as a measurable distance became a layered web of meanings, ranging from concrete dimensionality to abstract expansiveness. Still, we find traces of that intricate and related web of spatial meanings that we evidenced in the initial part of the discussion

Such semantic sedimentation prepared the ground for later philosophical reifications. By the early modern period, distance as a numerical abstraction was transformed into a physical entity: space itself. Descartes had already defined space as a congruent system of (geometrical) relations between length, breadth, and height; Newton reified this abstraction into absolute space, a real though intangible entity; Einstein, finally, reconfigured it as relative spacetime. The linguistic chain stadion → spadion → spatium → spacium → space thus mirrors a philosophical process: the gradual reification of ‘extension’ from a measurable interval, to an universal container, where space took the role that in antiquity belonged to place (chōra and/or topos).

To put it differently: in Greek, stadion and spadion were dialectal variants denoting the same concept, but in Latin, stadium and spatium became semantically distinct. The former retained its sense of standard length and gathering place, while the latter expanded into the full semantic range of spatiality: distance, region, and the (void) extent that makes motion possible. This conceptual expansion, layered over centuries of linguistic, social, and philosophical practice, eventually enabled the modern scientific idea of space as the necessary condition for the existence and motion of bodies.

1.3.3 From the Greek ‘Stadion’ to the Latin ‘Spatium’: Philosophical Argumentation

Up to now, we have seen how historical and etymological evidence supports the descent of the English space from Greek stadion/spadion through Latin spatium/spacium. Yet no one clarified the meaning of this descent more profoundly than Martin Heidegger. In his 1951 lecture ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, Heidegger takes the bridge as an example of a built thing. He notes that ‘the space allowed by the bridge contains many places variously near or far from the bridge. These places, however, may be treated as mere positions between which there lies a measurable distance; a distance, in Greek ‘stadion’, always has room made for it, and indeed by bare positions. The space that is thus made by positions is space of a peculiar sort. As distance, or ‘stadion’, it is what the same word, ‘stadion’, means in Latin, a ‘spatium’, an intervening space or interval.’^[49] In other words, Heidegger retrieves the philological chain we have traced: stadion → spatium → space.

But Heidegger goes further. In the same lecture, he explains that the German Raum—unlike the Latin spatium—still retains its original sense of ‘room’: ‘what the word for space, ‘raum’, designates is said by its ancient meaning. Raum, rum, means a place that is freed for settlement and lodging. A space is something that has been made room for, something that has been freed, namely, within a boundary, Greek peras. A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding. That is why the concept is that of horismos, that is, the horizon, the boundary. Space is in essence that for which room has been made, that which is let into its bounds. That for which room is made is always granted and hence is joined, that is, gathered, by virtue of a locale, that is, by such a thing as the bridge. Accordingly, spaces receive their essential being from locales and not from space.’ ^[50]

From this Heideggerian perspective, space is not a detached container but always arises from locale and boundary. Place, not space, is primary: it gathers and delimits, while space (as dimensionality, distance, extent) is abstracted from within that bounded place. Space accompanies place as its complementary aspect: the abstractness of extension paired with the concreteness of locale. This allows us to reformulate the relation: place generates space. The moment a boundary is drawn, dimensionality can be imagined. Yet because our cognition tends toward abstraction, we are tempted to treat dimensionality as independent reality.^[51] That, I suggest, is the historical root of why space often appears as if it were more fundamental than place.

We return, therefore, to two guiding assets of this research:

1. To disclose the intimacy and reciprocity between space and place—a structure I designate as space-and-place.
2. To show how within this structure two moments co-exist: the concreteness of locale (place) and the abstraction of dimensionality (space).

It was precisely from these dual possibilities that the separate notions of place and space historically emerged.

1.4 Spatial Terminology: Alternative Senses and Etymologies Between Space and Place

As regards the spatial (or placial…) meaning of ‘room’ in the sense articulated by Heidegger – namely, Raum as ‘a place that is freed for settlement and lodging’ – and its etymological relation to Greek and Latin terms, I now wish to expand Heidegger’s observations.

According to the Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic in the Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series, both the English ‘room’ and the German ‘Raum’ can be traced back to the Proto-Germanic reconstructed root *ruma-, an adjectival form meaning ‘roomy, spacious’, which in turn derives from the Indo-European protoform *HruH-mo.^[52] From a related protoform (*Hreu-) developed the Tocharian A and B verb räw-, ‘to open’; from *HreuH-es- we find the Avestan noun rauuah- (‘open space’), the Latin rus, ruris (‘countryside’), and the Old Irish roe (‘field, open land’). Again, from rumjan- developed the Old Norse verb ryma and the German weak verb räumen, both meaning ‘to clear.’^[53]

This chain of forms and meanings corresponds closely with Heidegger’s hermeneutic interpretation of space as that which has been ‘freed within a boundary’. Indeed, the semantic affinities across languages – ‘space’, ‘open land’, ‘field,’ ‘countryside’, ‘to clear’ – confirm the persistence of a conceptual nexus between openness, clearing, and inhabitation. Can this same nexus be connected to the Greek chōra (χώρα)? Strictly speaking, I have found no direct etymological descent of chōra from the reconstructed roots *HruH-mo, *Hreu-, or *HreuH-es (though there are partial phonetic echoes in the second syllable). Yet semantically, the relation is striking: chōra designates land, region, ground, or countryside, precisely the sense Heidegger retrieves when he defines Raum as ‘a place that is freed for settlement and lodging.’ ^[54]

This sense of space, semantically tethered to a concrete interpretation of place, is also linked to the Greek stadion (orspadion), understood as distance or extension derived from agricultural practice. Here too, fields and open lands are the shared ground: territorial clearings available to be traversed, whether by plough-oxen or by runners. An abstract connection emerges between the linear motion of animals drawing the plough through the soil, the athletes running a marked distance, and chōra in its philosophical sense as ‘room where bodies roam.’ The stadion thus exemplifies space as measurable extension, abstracted from motion. The etymological root of spadion in spao (‘to draw, pull’) confirms this kinship: spatiality originates in the drawn movement across a bounded extension. Movement is, in fact, the decisive notion. As Edward Casey reminds us in The Fate of Place, ‘room translates chōra, one of whose affiliated verbs is chorein, “to go” especially in the sense of “to roam”.’^[55] In this way, both chōra and stadion converge: each expresses space as an extension articulated by motion, whether agricultural or athletic, practical or ceremonial.

Image 8: Hypothesis of etymological and semantic connections concerning the concept of space understood as ‘room’ (German ‘raum’), that is, territorial or dimensional extent freed from obstacles and capable of being occupied.

The semantic web thickens if we consider The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World by Professors James P. Mallory and Douglas Q. Adams. We can see how close the Greek notion of chōra is to the etymological sequence we have seen before, even if, in this case too, it is the semantic affinity that strikes us. We read: ‘the concept of an “open space” is found in *reuh_xes- which indicates “open fields” in Celtic (e.g., Old Irish roi “field, open land”) and Italic (e.g., Latin rus “countryside, open fields”) and “space” in Avestan ravah-. The same root with a different extension gives us Modern English room. The underlying verb (*reuh_x-) is preserved only in Tocharian AB ru- “be open”. Semantically more opaque is *ghoh₁ros which is a “free space, area between, land” in Greek khōros but a “pit, hole” in Tocharian (e.g.,Toch B, kare).’ ^[56]

Other resonances complicate and enrich this picture. The Greek chōra and chōros are formally and semantically adjacent to terms like chaos and chaunos (meaning ‘loose, with holes’ or even ‘hole, empty space, yawning opening’ or even ‘gaping’,  hence, ‘porous, spongy, loose’),^[57] or the Latin cavus (‘hollow’), all of which suggest empty or unbounded extension. Similar meanings are preserved in Proto-Germanic *gaura- from the IE root *g^hour-o-, similar to *g^hou-ro-, related to Sanskrit ghora (‘terrible’), evoking the awe of the abyss or void.^[58] The semantic field shades into the existential: emptiness as absence, vacancy, even mourning; indeed, chōra is often associated with the similar form chēra (‘widow’ in Greek), from PIE *g^heh₁, (to leave behind)^[59], which suggests ‘unoccupied space’ in a figurative sense. From chōra, chaos, cavus, and their Indo-European cognates, a vast lexical constellation unfolds: cave, gape, hole (English), Höhle (German), cavo / caverna (Italian), caveau (French), cueva (Spanish). These words preserve the sense of space as openness, void, or abyss, extending the semantic range from cultivated field to terrifying emptiness.

Altogether, this network of etymological and semantic correspondences shows how our understanding of ‘space’ has always been suspended between the concrete and the abstract: between field and void, clearing and abyss, motion and emptiness. It is precisely through such oppositions – settled land versus unbounded openness, traversed distance versus terrifying vacancy – that the richness of the spatial concept has developed across centuries.

1.5 Proto-Indo-European Roots: Notions of Dimensionality and Locale

I close this etymological survey of space and its relation to place with a hypothesis concerning the ‘double nature’ underlying both notions. This double nature, I suggest, lies at the root of spatiality (as dimensionality) and locality, which we have examined through the terms chōra and topos. It appears to have been embedded in the ancient conception of space, particularly insofar as its meaning was linguistically tied to the stadion/spadion (restricting our scope here to the Greek and Roman period, before the eventual separation of ‘space’ and ‘place’ into distinct modern categories through centuries of philosophical debate).

By ‘double nature’ I mean the coexistence of two conceptual layers within those classical terms. The first is more concrete and static, tied to position, locale, or bounded site, from which the traditional understanding of ‘place’ ultimately developed. The second is more abstract and dynamic, tied to distance, extension, or dimensionality – originally conceived as the interval between concrete locales – from which the modern conception of “space” as a dimensional continuum emerged.

With respect to the original understanding of the concept of space, we have seen that, etymologically, it descends from the Greek Aeolic and Doric spadion, corresponding to the Attic form stadion. This word carried three interconnected meanings: a footrace; a place of assembly; and the distance or extension of the footrace, which in turn became a standard of length. I would suggest that traces of the ‘double nature’ of space may already be embedded in the two linguistic roots sta- and spa-, from which the families of related terms acquired distinct connotations.

The first connotation, from the root sta-, is fundamentally static: it denotes that which stands, is fixed, or simply exists in a given location. From this sense, the concept of place ultimately emerged. At the same time, sta- also helped shape the early understanding of space, since a standard of length presupposes fixed points of reference: space as extension abstracted from a determinate interval (diastemic space).^[60] The second connotation, from the root spa- (as in the verbs spao or span), is dynamic: it expresses that which expands, stretches, spans across, or extends from one location to another. This more dynamic conception belongs to the semantic family of ‘space as room’ (chōra) – space as the extent in which bodies move or roam. It presupposes a further level of abstraction beyond the intuitive notion of diastemic space. Together, these two sets of notions – static and dynamic – developed into the concept of space.^[61]

As for their Indo-European ancestry, various reconstructed roots appear relevant. For spa- we find forms such as *sp-, *spe(i)-, *(s)peh₂-, *sph₁to-, *sp(e)r-g, sparg, etc. For sta- we find *sta-, *st(h)a-, *steh₂-, *(s)teh₂-, st(e)h₂-ti-, and so forth.^[62]

On the ‘static’ side, a vast network of terms confirms this semantic cluster. Latin gives us stare (to stand), from which status, statio, and by extension English state, situation, station all descend; likewise constare (to stand together), restare (to stand firm), and substantia (that which underlies, literally ‘stands beneath’). Germanic languages preserve the Proto-Germanic stadi, with descendants such as German Stand, Stadt, Stätte, and stehen.^[63] Greek contributes stadios/stadaios, stasis (standing, stance), stater (standard, something firm), and diastēma (interval or distance, literally “that which stands between’), from the same root as histēmi (to stand, set). From this semantic field stadion itself derives, carrying the sense of something firm or fixed – like the measured length of a racecourse. In fact, whether we think of the stadion as a racecourse or as a unit of measure, it presupposes fixed points – a start and finish line – that remain stable across time. Thus, embedded in the stadion, and by extension in spatium and ultimately ‘space’, is the concrete notion of positions or locales as that which stand firm: precisely what Heidegger recognized when he wrote that space is constituted by positions, and that from locales or places, distance, i.e., ‘stadion’ or ‘spatium’ – and with it space – is generated.^[64]

On the ‘dynamic’ side, the spa- root gathers words and images tied to movement, extension, and expansion – the passage from one position to another. The very Latin prefix ex- (in extent, extension) encodes this movement outward from a given situation or locale. This dynamic aspect corresponds to what we expect of a footrace: a movement from start to finish. In the context of land measurement, the same movement corresponds to the action of oxen or mules pulling the plough back and forth, after which fixed points (start and end) and measurable extensions could be defined. The Greek verbs spao (σπάω, to draw, pull, drag, tear) and span (σπάν) capture this very activity.^[65] The affinity between these verbs and the agricultural practices that gave rise to the spadion as distance is striking, and I believe their common root spa- lies at the origin. From spa- comes the idea of stretching across, traversing, crossing through, and with it the fundamental intuition of dimensionality. As Robert Beekes notes in his Etymological Dictionary of Greek, the Greek verb ‘spao’ – σπάω – may derive from PIE (s)peh₂- (“to draw, set in motion violently”), a root that perfectly reflects the dynamic dimension inherent in the notion of space.^[66]

I believe this is where we need to look if we want to trace the source of the terms ‘stadion’/‘spadion’ (and ‘space’, etymologically and semantically connected to these Greek terms). In the first case—stadion—the focus is on the fixed situations or positions that determine the (fixed) distance to be traversed or covered. This is likely where the notion of ‘diastemic space’ derives from. In the second case—spadion—the focus is on the idea of movement and the dimensionality attached to the movement required to define a certain extent. It was this sense of movement that made the term suitable for describing an extent where a body could roam, similarly to the Greek term chōra (space as room).

What is meaningful is that, similarly to the already analyzed cases of ‘chōra’ and ‘topos’, the terms stadion and spadion could convey notions of locales and dimensionality inherent to such locales. The image—or idea—of movement necessary to fill the gap between distant points/locales and the dimensionality directly associated with that gap was eventually retained in the root ‘spa’, from PIE roots *sph₁to-, *sp-, *sp(e)r-g, *(s)pen, *(s)peh₂-, etc., which gave rise to Latin spatium and English space. By contrast, the more concrete and static idea of locales that determine distances or intervals—explicit in the root ‘sta’, from PIE roots *stah-, *steh-, *(s)teh-, *st(e)h₂-ti-, etc.—was especially retained in the concept of place. I believe this ‘static’ connotation is probably why place is sometimes misplaced for simple location.

Image 9: Space is etymologically and semantically connected to the Greek term ‘spadion’ (Doric/Aeolic) – or ‘stadion’ (Attic) – via the Latin ‘spatium’, (medieval ‘spacium’). Two natures converged into space-as-dimensional extension deriving from the Greek terms: one, more static, evoked by the root sta-, and related to the notions of position or locale after which fixed distances can be determined and understood as interval or extension (diastemic space); the other, dynamic, and evoked by the root spa-, to which space is etymologically connected via the Greek verbs spao, or span (to draw or drag, with reference to the precise distance covered with a single draw by the linear movement of the oxen that draw the plough through the soil), and which, as a mode of abstraction, suggests us the idea of any extent or extension traversed by the movement of bodis (this is space as room where bodies roam, or, in Greek, chōra).

The ‘dynamic’ root spa-—from which the notion of space as extended dimensionality directly associated with movement arises—was preserved in several modern languages descending from Latin. Thus we have Italian spazio, French espace, Spanish espacio, and even the German verb spazieren (‘to stroll’). The semantic connection between spa- and the concept of space—dynamic, directional, and dimensional—is particularly evident in Italian, the language closest to Latin, which first formalized the concept of spatium.

In Italian, an entire family of words retains and makes visible these hidden meanings: verbs such as espandere (expand), spargere (spread, spill), sparpagliare (scatter, disperse), spappolare (smash), dispensare (distribute), spacciare (pass off), spaccare (split, cleave), sparigliare (divide), spatolare (apply with a spatula), spazzolare (brush), spalmare (spread), spazzare (sweep); and even, in a looser sense, sparire (disappear, go away), sparare (shoot), spanciare (swell). Likewise, nouns such as spanna (span), spago (string, cord), spaghetto (noodle), spada (sword, spade), spatola (spatula), spazzola (brush), spazzino (street cleaner), spazzolino (toothbrush), spasso (stroll, roaming), or spiazzo (open space, yard).

Despite their variety, all of these terms encode some form of action or movement, and always a dimensionality linked to that movement. As an architect, accustomed to translating words into figures, drawings, and models—points, lines, surfaces, volumes—I perceive in these terms an intrinsic orientation: a sense of direction coupled with dimensional extension. In other words, each of them can be illustrated as a kind of vector (see Image 10, below).

Image 10: Retention of the root ‘spa’ (whence the term space descends) in many Italian terms, connoting the idea of movement to which the notion of extension or extended dimensionality is associated (if not precisely created by the movement itself).

Image 11: The act of cleaning: a spatial extent – a span properly – covered by the movement of the arm back and forth, (from the 1948 ad of the product).

Coming back to the etymological relation between words, we have seen that the root spa- may be connected to the Greek spáō or span (to draw, pull, tear away, drag), from which both spadion and the Latin spatium may descend. To be more precise about the provenance of the two Greek terms – spadion and stadion – it is plausible that spadion was the original name of the racecourse at Olympia. In fact, spadion belongs to the Doric and Aeolic dialects, and Olympia – the birthplace of the Olympic Games – lay in a region of the Peloponnese where Northwest Greek, closely related to Doric, was spoken. It is therefore likely that the sacred racecourse was first called spadion, before being narrated as stadion in Attic dialect and literature.

From the Doric/Aeolic form spadion, the Latins could have borrowed the term (adapting it into spatium), since the Attic dialect was not present in Magna Graecia, the area of southern Italy colonized by Greeks from the 8th and 7th centuries BC.^[67] By contrast, the Attic form stadion only became widely known through the prestige of classical Greek culture and literature, where Attic was the dominant dialect^[68] – the dialect of Athens and of authors such as Herodotus, who consistently uses stadion.^[69] Thus, the diffusion of Attic literature ensured that stadion, rather than spadion, prevailed across the Greek and Roman world.

The root spa- also connects to the Proto-Germanic spannen and to the Latin spannum or spanna, as well as spatium. Both vertical (diachronic) and horizontal (cross-linguistic) connections reveal a web of semantic coherence: English span, spate, or even spasm, spam, sparkle and sparse all preserve a sense of motion across an extent, whether real or figurative. What is ‘sparse’ if not something irregularly spread through an expanse? The root spa- consistently conveys movement and dimensionality—an idea preserved in the traditional understanding of space, as when we say that a body moves “through space,” whether it be our own body from place to place or a celestial body across the heavens.

This conception of space as something traversed by bodies or ‘spanned’ is especially fertile for architects, choreographers, film theorists, physicists, and others. And yet, strictly speaking, it is not ‘space’ that is traversed, but always places: every movement is a passage from place to place (‘locomotion’ is etymologically movement/motion from locus to locus, that is, from place to place). Space itself is not given but abstracted: a representational entity arising from dimensionality, from the span opened between fixed positions or locales.

Image 12: Space available for the movement of actors in a movie-scene.^[70]

Image 13: Rudolf Laban’s theory of movement and space, 1926.

Image 14: The study of movement between functional areas is a basic tool for architects to create meaningful architectural spaces. On this specific question, see the article Archi-textures, particularly Paragraphs 2, and 2.1 (Above: Architectural Competition ‘Premio di Architettura Città dei Mille‘, Bergamo, 2003, Calvi Rollino, Panarese Architetti).

Image 15: Cultural Centre, Architectural Competition ‘Premio di Architettura Città dei Mille‘, Bergamo, 2003, Calvi Rollino, Panarese Architetti.

To sum up: within the early conceptualizations of spatiality conveyed by stadion/spadion and later by spatium, two complementary levels were already present. One is static, expressed in the root sta- (as in stadion), tied to fixity and position. The other is dynamic, expressed in the root spa- (as in spadion and spatium), tied to movement, extension, and distance. Whether we consider the footrace (stadion/spadion as racecourse) or the measurement of length (stadion as unit of measure), the underlying logic is the same: fixed limits between which a movement spans a distance. As a matter of fact, only after the distance between two different positions is traversed we can say that we have traversed a span; that span – any span as gap or interval – is not immediately given but emerges as result of the action of traversing a distance, that is, the necessary action of going from place to place, or from side to side. Note that such a distance can be either ideal or actual, that is it can be ‘covered’ by the mind only.

Image 16: Detail of Kepler’s illustration of the orbits of the Sun and Mars hypothesized by Ptolemy in geoastral space.^[71] A mental notion of space was probably grasped by medieval astronomers, at first. On this specific issue between physical and epistemological considerations on space and place, see the article The Place of Space.

The concept of space thus emerges from the interplay of limits and the actions required to cross the interval they define. Either we regard space as a sheer distance between points, or as a concrete extension between locations, in the end, space emerges from places as locales and/or positions, as also Heidegger argued. And what is a place if not a notion related to boundaries, as in the original intention of Aristotle? By reading Aristotle and Heidegger, we understand that notions of place (topos for Aristotle) and space respectively, are kept together within limits. Drawing on Heidegger, we understand that only concrete limits offer the possibility to transcend them and embrace the unlimited – this is the case for the (abstract) concept of space – as a possibility. Yet the dichotomy between the limited (place) and the unlimited (space) has to be read according to complementary ontological and epistemological perspectives. Place and space are complementary: the limited and the unlimited, the concrete and the abstract, the locale and the dimensional continuum. Our access to the unlimited is always grounded in the limits of our embodied existence and the world we inhabit.

This original complementarity was largely forgotten in later centuries, despite Heidegger’s attempt to retrieve it. At the origin, however, the notions of locale and dimensionality were intertwined, even conflated within single terms (chōra, topos, stadion/spadion). Only later were they distributed into distinct categories: chōra and spatium on the side of space, where dimensionality prevails; topos and locus on the side of place, as position and locale. Yet doubts persist about too rigid a separation

The history of how these notions diverged—how dimensionality became exclusively attached to “space” and position or location to “place”—is long and complex, involving multiple philosophical, scientific, and linguistic shifts. It is to this historico-philosophical narrative that I am going to discuss at RSaP—Rethinking Space and Place, in the forthcoming articles.

2. On the Etymology of the Word ‘Place’

Even though the previous paragraphs focused on space, we have seen that, in the end, it is not possible to speak about space without mentioning place. The two conceptualizations are closely connected, and any rigid separation should be avoided. This does not mean, however, that we should refrain from looking for distinctions between them; on the contrary. The complexity of these concepts lies in unveiling their mutual relation, or complementarity: space and place cannot be separated without breaking their original reciprocity, yet their domains of application remain distinct. Ultimately, space and place are different concepts, but their distinction itself is what makes their reciprocity possible.

By way of a short digression, I would suggest that place and space form a kind of ‘yin–yang’ relation in which the concrete (place) and the abstract (space) are reciprocally connected. Together, they help explain reality as an overarching phenomenon emerging from the interplay of concrete and abstract processes. When a process results in a concrete entity—for example, physicochemical processes giving rise to a material state—that entity may be described as a place, or as existing in place, since place is a relational realm of object-places, one of which is the concrete entity of our example. Conversely, when a process results in an abstract entity—for instance, a creative cognitive process generating the idea of a unicorn—that entity may be described as a spatial entity, or as an abstract entity existing in space. Should that unicorn ever be realized as a living organism through biological and physicochemical processes, the abstract spatial entity would be transformed into a concrete one: the place of physicochemical and biological processes, situated in a concrete locale (a laboratory, barn, or grassland).

Thus, place and space refer to the concrete and abstract dimensions of reality, understood as the all-embracing realm that emerges from the interplay of objective processes and subjective cognition. Abstraction is of course tied to the cognitive activity of living beings, but in relation to space I focus specifically on symbolization—a highly specialized intellectual process unique to the human mind. This is one respect in which my interpretation of space differs slightly from Kant’s, though I remain close to him in affirming its intimate connection to cognition. For this reason, I would not describe the mental image of territory possessed by non-human animals as “space”: to do so would ignore the sociocultural processes intrinsic to the very creation of the notion of space.

Returning to the linguistic argument, the ambiguous etymological and semantic relation between space and place is well attested in the multiple senses of place reported by the Oxford English Dictionary, already analyzed in the previous article What Is Place? What Is Space? Of the first five senses of place listed by the OED, four explicitly refer to space: 1) an open space in a city… 2) a space… 3) a particular part of space… 5) a portion of space in which people dwell together…. This reveals a kind of vicious circularity between space and place, rooted in their original solidarity as notions of locale and dimensionality. Yet this circularity is not the reciprocity I advocate here.

Instead, I emphasize a different kind of circularity, grounded in the complementarity of ontological and epistemological interpretations of reality. Thus, we cannot reduce place to space, nor space to place. To do so would be to reproduce a Newtonian substantivalist view of space, which I reject. Rather, space and place are fundamental categories that help us grasp reality as the domain emerging from the encounter of the concrete and the abstract. They are distinct, but inseparable. Consequently, defining one in terms of the other merely displaces the problem, creating ambiguity.

To avoid such confusion, I propose the following distinction:

• Place is the concrete entity—a system arising from physicochemical, biological, social, and symbolic processes—upon which reality unfolds (ontological interpretation).
• Space is the abstract concept that emerges from place through highly specialized cognitive processes. We can get space only by reasoning (epistemological interpretation).

Space, in this sense, is indispensable for the human mind in coming to terms with the processes that constitute place.^[72] It is so pervasive that it actively shapes our modern modes of thought. In admitting this, I come closer to Kant’s interpretation of space as an essential structure of cognition. In this way, I preserve both their difference (they are distinct concepts) and their continuity (they cannot be separated without undermining their mutuality). Only by holding together this complementarity of concrete and abstract can we begin to understand reality as an all-embracing placial/spatial realm.

Concerning its etymology, what does the Oxford English Dictionary say about the term ‘place’? Literally, place is a substantive derived from Middle English place, itself from Old French place (11th century). This corresponds to Prussian plassa, Spanish plaza, Portuguese praça, Italian piazza, and medieval Latin placia. The late Latin form plattia represents the classical Latin platea, meaning ‘broad way’ or ‘open space,’ which in turn comes from the Greek adjective plateia (‘broad’), as in plateia hodos (‘broad way’). the OED continues: ‘The Latin word had been already taken into Old Northumbrian in the form plæce, plætse, rendering Latin platea of the Vulgate; but the history of the current word begins with the adoption of the French place in sense of space or extension in two or three directions, the modern use (an open space in a city, a square) being a more recent borrowing from the Romanic languages. Form the latter came also the Middle Dutch plaetse, Dutch plaats, German platz… Place has superseded Old English stow and (largely) stede; it answers to French lieu, Latin locus, as well as to French place, and the senses are thus very numerous and difficult to arrange.’^[73]

As with the term ‘space’, no direct reference to Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots is given in the OED. The same etymological descent appears in the Oxford Concise Etymological Dictionary and the Collins Etymological Dictionary: in both cases, place is traced back to Latin platea (‘a broad way, an open space’), itself derived from the Greek adjective plateia, feminine of platus, ‘broad.’^[74] This suggests a situation similar to that of space: the proximity of Greek and Roman culture encouraged what we might call a horizontal transmission of terms between the two languages.

But what about possible vertical connections? To uncover hypothetical roots reaching back to PIE, we must turn to more specialized resources. For example, in The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World we find that the reconstructed ancestor of Greek plateia and Latin platea—both referring to ‘broad’—may be the PIE root *pl̥th₂us, derived from **pleth₂- meaning ‘spread’.^[75] Similarly, in the Etymological Dictionary of Ancient Greek, the Greek adjective platus (“broad”) is traced to the PIE root **pl̥th₂-u-.^[76] (see Image 17 below).

Image 17: Etymology of the English word ‘place’ from the PIE roots *pl-.

If we return to Latin, Greek, and ultimately PIE roots, it seems that the source of the word ‘place’ can be traced back to a dimensional notion that already contains the idea of extension—the meaning conveyed by terms such as ‘broad’ or ‘spread.’ It is as if no place could exist without some characteristic dimensional extension: that quality by which we say that a thing is broad, or spreads within certain limits. This is yet another confirmation that, from the very beginning, behind spatial or placial conceptions, both the notions of locale and dimensionality were involved.

I believe this fact—the qualitatively extended character of place—will be critical when we attempt to distinguish between what is concrete and actual and what is abstract and ideal, or even possible. Tentatively, I would say that any concrete aspect of reality-as-place has an intrinsic minimal dimension, or at least a non-zero mass or energy. This is what I mean by the ‘qualitatively’ extended character of place. By contrast, abstract, ideal, or possible aspects of reality have a physical dimension that is zero, or even zero mass and energy. Such an argument brings us back to the Aristotelian concept of place (topos) as a bounded entity—place as that which allows things to exist concretely and extensively only when they are located within boundaries. We could therefore say that whatever has a boundary, or in other words whatever possesses non-zero extension, mass, or energy, may be identified as a concrete place—a position reminiscent of certain Neoplatonic thinkers.^[77]

Concerning the notion of boundary (or limit), understood as fundamental for interpreting the concept of place, I must add a speculative digression. I believe boundaries are better explained in terms of the mutual relation between epistemology and ontology. Boundaries, in this sense, are attributions of the perceiving subject rather than intrinsic properties of objects. There is no actual physical line separating my skin from the chair I am sitting on: at the microscopic level we find only clouds of electrons, fields of repulsion and attraction between atoms, and deeper still, the activity of physical fields. Nowhere do we encounter a clear-cut demarcation. Instead, there is a primordial withness between elements: the atoms of my body are entangled with those of the chair and the environment in which both are immersed. This withness ultimately extends to the relation between subject and object, and even between objects themselves. It is precisely in virtue of this fundamental withness that the other can be recognized as different, and that order among entities can be established. The concepts of place and space, as handed down through tradition, have attempted to describe this fundamental order of/between entities or things (whether subjects or objects).

Returning to the main argument: everything that exists as an actual, concrete entity with non-zero dimension or non-zero mass-energy is a place. As I like to say, reality is a place, ultimately. For me, place is not only necessary for reasoning about the order of things; it is constitutive of that order, since place originally contains both the intensive and extensive dimensions of an entity. Beyond the linguistic veil, the concept of place can even be used to define the very existence of the thing: the thing coincides with its place—or put differently, the thing is a place (and conversely, the place is a thing). Here we enter highly speculative terrain, at the crossroads of philosophy and physics: a critical territory for the concepts of space and place. The need to rethink space and place—which motivates my theoretical project—is born from the ongoing physical and philosophical redefinitions of fundamental concepts such as space (or spacetime), place, time, matter, energy, force, subjectivity, objectivity, and causality, through which we attempt to understand and represent the nature of reality.

In the end, with respect to the term ‘place’, etymological analysis confirms the same inextricable mutuality between locale and dimensionality that we have already observed in other placial or spatial terms: chōra, topos, and space (the latter in its etymological and semantic link with Latin spatium and Greek spadion or stadion). What stands out, however, is a certain semantic gap between English place and other Romance or Greek terms derived from the same root (see Image 17). In those languages, the traditional meanings corresponding to English place are often conveyed by terms that are not etymologically related to it: Italian luogo, Romanian loc, French lieu, Spanish lugar (all descending from Latin locus), or Greek topos.

2.2 Latin and Greek terms for Place: Locus and Topos

In the previous paragraphs, we noted that one of the earliest Greek terms through which the notion of place was formalized was chōra, which chronologically preceded the term topos. At the beginning, the two were largely synonymous, though chōra generally referred to a region of wider extent than topos. We also observed that chōra appears already in the early epic, while topos emerges later in the Attic tragedies.^[78] Eventually, we noted that it became common—though controversial—to translate chōra as space and topos as place.

Turning to Latin, the modern concept of place has always been associated with the term locus, which Latin writers and scholastic translators used to render Greek topos. Yet despite the frequent equivalence between topos and locus in translation, their etymological relation is uncertain: structural and phonetic affinities are weak, and their connection to PIE roots remains difficult to prove. This has long puzzled linguists.

With respect to topos, the English lexicographer John Chadwick proposed a striking hypothesis: that the word might be a genuine invention of the Greek language, a primary word not borrowed from or descended from any other language or PIE root. This hypothesis, though unconventional, elegantly avoids the difficulties of deriving topos from more remote origins. The Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series) confirms the problem: ‘the broad semantic range renders etymologizing difficult’. Although some PIE roots are tentatively suggested (e.g., top-o- or tokw-o-; or tep- ‘to hit, stick, smear’, yielding a noun top-o- ‘stain, spot’ → ‘place’), none is conclusive.^[79] The French philologist Pierre Chantraine is even more categorical, declaring the etymology of topos ‘inconnue’, unknown, obscure.^[80] Hence Chadwick’s hypothesis retains considerable interest.

But how, according to Chadwick, was the term newly coined? In Lexicographica Graeca, he suggests the following scenario: ‘It began with a reply to a question containing the interrogative ποῦ (poù—where?’), such as περὶ τὸ ποῦ ἀπορῶ [perì tò poù aporō—meaning ‘I wonder about the ‘where’/it is about the ‘where’ that I am perplexed’]. This might have been misinterpreted—with a change of accent—as the genitive τόπου (tópou) of a supposed noun τόπος (tópos), which was thus created by back-formation. The new coinage filled a very useful gap in the language, which until then seems to have lacked a single noun to describe location in space. For nouns created from interrogatives compare English “whereabouts,” “the why and wherefore”,“Italian ubicazione”.’^[81]

This is fascinating: if Chadwick is right, topos emerged originally in a figurative context. That would create a kind of symmetry with chōra: while chōra originally denoted concrete locales (land, region, ground), topos may have begun as an abstract, rhetorical expression. This figurative use survives in the familiar expression tópos koinós (‘commonplace’). As Chadwick himself remarks, ‘the earliest uses seem to be fairly restricted… The simplest meaning appears to be a point or region in space, geographical locality, place, spot.’ Philological caution is required here, since the Greeks had no dedicated term for ‘space’ (see note 5). Nonetheless, it remains clear that chōra was used for broader extents than topos—which helps explain why later authors tended to render chōra as space, while topos was translated as locus or place within space. Still, each of these terms—chōra, topos, spatium, locus, space, place—carries nuances of meaning that no simple translation can capture.

As for locus, Quintilian attests its archaic form ‘stlocus’.^[82] Yet, like topos, the term resists clear derivation from PIE. According to Michiel de Vaan (Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages), stlocus may descend from the root *stel- (‘to place’), though the expected suffix *-oko- is absent. Another possibility is that the prefix stl- reduces to *sl-, yielding a preform *slok-o-. In any case, ‘the further etymology remains unclear’.^[83] The same PIE root, stel-, is also cited in The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, though without direct connection to Latin locus. More generally, we read, ‘general words for “a place” are built on the verbal root *steh₂– ‘stand’, hence we have *ste´h₂tis (e.g., Lat statio “position, station”, NE stead, Lith stacias “standing”, Grk stasis “place, setting, standing, stature”, Av staiti- “station”, Skt sthıti- “position”).^[84] These are precisely the roots we have already seen in relation to the prefix sta- in stadion, denoting position or fixed localization between points, whence distances and standards of lenght.

It is interesting to note that, by means of the linguistic root ‘sta’, which can be ultimately associated to meanings very close to the notion of place, we might have an empirical confirmation of the logical hypothesis with which we began our etymological inquiry: namely, that the notion of place preceded the more abstract notion of space. The American linguist Morris Swadesh offers support for this view: in his basic list of 100 Proto-Indo-European words, apart from demonstratives like this and that (which allow territorial relations such as here and there), the only item clearly tied to spatial/placial meaning is the root term *(s)teh₂, whose meaning is related to the notion of position as standing.^[85] This root is recorded in nearly every Indo-European language. Only the most basic words—I, you, we, this, that, foot, sleep, water, name—occur more frequently.^[86] No word in this basic list denotes an abstract concept. Such observations, pioneered by Swadesh, laid the foundations for glottochronology.^[87]

Returning to the root *stel-, the Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World interprets it as a verb of placement: ‘to put into a standing position, to put in place, to make stand’ (e.g., Modern English stall; German stellen ‘put, place’; Old Prussian stallit ‘place’; Greek stéllō ‘make ready, send, set, arrange’).^[88] From this root derive many terms semantically linked to the notion of place or that which is set in position: Latin/Italian stele (‘landmark’), stella (‘star’); Greek stele (‘column, marker’); German Stelle (‘place, position’).^[89] Closely related is Proto-Germanic *stalla– (‘standing, stall, stable’), whence Old English steal (‘position, place’), English stall, and Old Frisian stal (‘stall, standing’).^[90]

Conclusions

This study has argued for the priority of the more concrete notion of place over the more abstract notion of space on linguistic, historical, philological, and philosophical grounds. While today the two are often treated as distinct, their origins show that notions of locale (environing situation) and dimensionality (extension) were closely linked. This is evident in the early Greek chōra and later terms such as topos, stadion/spadion, and Latin spatium. In epic usage, place (chōra) appears first, carrying temporal and physical primacy. Heidegger later reaffirmed its philosophical priority, showing that distance, measure, and interval (space) emerge from locales or positions. From the beginning, placial and spatial terms contained a ‘double nature:’ one concrete, tied to locale and position; the other abstract, tied to extension. As we have observed, the two form an inseparable network of meanings that only historical and philological inquiry can clarify. The Greek–Latin roots of space (spadion/stadion and spatium) reveal this duality. The root sta- signals fixed positions and the intervals between them, while spa- conveys movement and the dimensionality associated with it. From the stadion as agricultural measure and race-course through spadion and spatium, the dynamic sense of extension was gradually abstracted, giving rise to the modern concept of space as a neutral three-dimensional immersive entity. The ancient Greeks and the Latins lacked such a concept; its emergence required centuries of philosophical, mathematical, and astronomical elaboration. By contrast, the etymology of place confirms its descent from the static root sta-, possibly one of the most ancient Indo-European roots, suggesting the primacy of placial concepts and their concreteness. An alternative root, *pl̥th₂us, links place to the idea of ‘breadth’ (platus, broad), emphasizing its intrinsic, qualitative extension. Thus, place denotes what is materially extended and non-zero, while space represents a purely abstract extension without materiality—a distinction also upheld by Neoplatonic thinkers.

In sum, place precedes space both historically and ontologically: what is concrete exists as a place, while space arises through abstraction. Linguistic analysis, when combined with historical, philological, and philosophical perspectives, proves indispensable for clarifying such fundamental concepts. To this interdisciplinary effort, other fields (including architecture—e.g., see the article Concepts of Space in Vitruvius) may also contribute, widening our understanding of what space and place mean.

Notes

[1] For an introduction to the Proto-Indo-European world and language, see: J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Indo-European World (New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2006). Another interesting and easily readable text that aims at tracing back the evolution of languages from a common mother tongue is: Merritt Ruhlen, The Origin of Language (New York: John Wiley, 1994). Broadly speaking, Professor Ruhlen says that the Proto-Indo-European language was ‘an unwritten language spoken at least 6,000 years ago’ (p. 6). While Professors Mallory and Adams, who are specifically focused on the Proto-European-Language, take different pieces of evidence – archaeological, linguistics, cultural – that might offer a temporal range for dating the horizon of the Proto-European-Language, to be included in the period between c. 4500 and 2500 BC (pages 92-104).

[2] Max Jammer, Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics (New York: Dover publications, 1993), xv.

[3] the article I refer to is Concepts of Space in Vitruvius.

[4] In this context, by the term abstraction, I refer to the abstract modes of thought that characterized the development of the Greek world since the 7^th century BC. Like the French philosopher Michel Serres said in his text ‘Le Origini della Geometria’ (p. 65), I believe it was the Greek thinker Anaximander (VII-VI century BC) who inaugurated the modes of abstract thinking to explain the phenomena of the world: the ‘apeiron’ – that which is without limits, i.e., the unlimited or the boundless – is the first principle for all the (existing) things according to Anaximander. Then, for the very first time in the history of mankind, an abstract principle – the ‘apeiron’ – is taken as the ultimate principle to explain the origin of everything: not a concrete substance like water, air, or fire, but an abstract principle. Apart from the ‘apeiron’ another important abstract concept related to questions of space and place is ‘the void’ – ‘to kenon’- of the Atomists through which they offered an alternative cosmology with respect to the plenist theories of Aristotle.

[5] Heidegger explicitly said that the Greeks had no word for ‘space’. But according to Heidegger himself, ‘this is no accident, for they do not experience the spatial according to ‘extensio’ but instead according to place (topos) as ‘chōra’, which means neither place nor space but what is taken up and occupied by what stands there’; in Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 69. Similarly, the American mathematician Salomon Bochner, who provided the entry ‘Space’ for the ‘Dictionary of the Histories of Ideas’ maintains that the Greeks had no conceptions of space in the common way of (modern) thinking: ‘topos’ as place was the nearest appellation for space among the Greeks, denoting an ‘area, region, province’ and what is taken up and occupied by objects and bodies; see Salomon Bochner, “Space”, in Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), pp. 295-307.  I would like to point out that ‘what is taken up and occupied’ – as both Heidegger and Bochner say more or less explicitly – should be interpreted out of the dualism between matter and place (or space), which is typically modern. If ‘intensio’ is the main character of that which occupies, we can read ‘extensio’ either as its complementary character or as character emerging from ‘intensio’. In both cases, we reconnect to the hypothesis that in those original spatial designations – ‘chōra’ and ‘topos’ – we find both traces of dimensionality and locale. I have developed the aforementioned considerations on Heidegger and Bochner after Jeff Malpas: see also  Jeff E. Malpas, Place and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 24.

[6] For instance, according to Malpas, ‘although the English “space” is traceable to the Greek term stadion, while “place” is connected with the Greek term, plateia, discussions of place and space in Greek sources do not employ any terms etymologically connected with the English “place” or “space”. The most directly relevant Greek terms here are topos and chōra’; see: Jeff E. Malpas, Place and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 23.

[7] Keimpe Algra, Concepts of Space in Greek Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 31-38. Jeff E. Malpas, Place and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 24-25.

[8] Keimpe Algra, Concepts of Space in Greek Thought, 36.

[9] ‘Of the terms “chōra” and “topos” the former is the one which appears earliest in the written sources. Its basic meaning seems to be “land/ region/ground” (…) e.g., in the 8th book of the Odyssey (…). In written sources, the term “topos” is not encountered before Aeschylus. To judge from the ways it was generally used, we may infer that it was largely synonymous to “chōra”.‘ from Keimpe Algra, Concepts of Space in Greek Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 33.

[10] As ambiguous as that statement may appear in virtue of the fact that thinking is inherently abstract, I just want to put focus on the obvious fact that thinking, in turn, can be referred both to concrete and to abstract situations or facts; and, as we explained at the beginning of the paragraph, the reference to concrete objects, situations, or facts logically precedes to reference to abstract objects, situations or facts.

[11] Keimpe Algra, Concepts of Space in Greek Thought, 33-34.

[12] See: Homer, Iliad, book 6, line 516; Homer, Iliad, 17, 394; Homer, Iliad, 23, 349; Homer, Iliad, 23, 521; Homer, Odyssey, book 16, line 352; Homer, Odyssey, 8, 573 in, Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, revised and augmented throughout by Sir Henry Stuart Jones with the assistance of Roderick McKenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 2015.

[13] Ibid., p. 33: at this regard, Algra reports a couple of quotations from the Odyssey and the Iliad and he concludes that ‘in those cases where chōra should be translated “place/space” the idea is always that of an extension, whether two- or three-dimensional, which is occupied or which can be occupied’. That sense of chōra, which I call ‘abstract’, is especially evident in the following passage (Iliad, 23, 521): ‘and the horse is running directly in front of it and there is but a small stretch (χώρας) between them’.

[14] As we are going to see in the following paragraph about the etymology of the term ‘chōra’, there is also a plausible suggestion that this term is linked to a similar term – khera – meaning ‘widow’, so that the idea of something vacant can also be associated with the word in the sense of void or vacant place, a conceptualization that might have contributed to convey the term ‘chōra’ an abstract shade of meaning as well.

[15] Philosopher Jeff Malpas used the following sentence concerning the notion of place: ‘Place is inextricably bound up with notions of both dimensionality, or extension, and of locale, or environing situation’; in Malpas, Place and Experience, 25.  In the same context and page, with respect to the notions ‘chōra’ and ‘topos’, Malpas says: ‘Topos seems to be originally the more abstract term (though this is clearly a matter of degree – topos retains a certain concreteness absent from some contemporary, though otherwise similar, terms)’, see note 18 in Malpas’s book.

[16] Ibid., p. 25. This is the extended quotation: ‘although there is a strong temptation, particularly if one’s focus is on the concepts of place or locale, to try to develop a set of clearly differentiated and independent concepts, and, in particular, to try to develop a notion of place that is clearly separated off from any concept of space (something that often motivates authors to look to the Greek terms rather than the English), this temptation is one that ought to be resisted.

[17]

[17] I often rely on the hyphenated expression place-and-space to suggest a single structure or composite conception underlying both terms. The spatial/placial contains within itself two dimensions: on the one hand, the concrete, localized sense we normally associate with “place” (as locale or environing situation); on the other, the abstract and dimensional sense we associate with “space” (as extension or continuum of that situation). It is precisely this composite structure that I am attempting to elucidate by rethinking place and space not as opposed notions but as complementary ones. In this respect, Plato’s chōra remains a privileged historical concept: I interpret it as an early attempt to capture both locality and dimensionality in one conceptual gesture. For me, place and space are fundamental categories for interpreting the phenomena of reality. I attribute to them both ontological and epistemological significance. Clarifying their relation is indispensable, and in my framework the concept of place is primary. Place is the key to understanding the concrete and the actual (ontological perspective) while also being the source of abstraction itself. Everything that exists is a “place of processes.” Existence and place are correlative: there is no being without place, and no place without being. The distinction between the two is conceptual and linguistic rather than ontological, as Descartes already intuited. Within this framework, the concept of space belongs to place as its abstract counterpart. Space emerges through symbolic processes unique to the human mind (epistemological perspective). By abstraction, the mind isolates and emphasizes the extensive dimension of physical bodies—what can be measured, spanned, or mapped—while suspending other characteristics. This move reveals that space is not a primordial given but a mental construct: an abstraction from the more fundamental reality of place. Understanding reality thus requires correlating the ontological and epistemological dimensions. Reality is an encompassing realm shaped by the interplay of objects and subjects. Objects undergo physicochemical processes, but in a world inhabited by subjects, biological, social, and symbolic processes also become constitutive of reality. Without subjects, these dimensions would not exist. On this basis, I argue that place and space are two of the most fundamental and ubiquitous notions for making sense of reality. They are complementary, but not equivalent. Reality itself is best understood as place: the field where physicochemical, biological, social, and symbolic processes are made actual. Place belongs to the arena of things and bodies—indeed, the arena itself is nothing other than the totality of things and bodies as places. Space, by contrast, belongs to the arena of thought. It is ultimately a fictive but necessary construct, a symbolic abstraction that allows human beings to interpret and navigate places. Thus while place is the ontological ground of existence, space is an epistemological projection necessary for making sense of reality-as-place.

[18] As far as I know the English attribute ‘choral’ is specially referred to a musical context, while in the Italian language, for instance, it has a much wider sense and it is used in different contexts to denote a multiplicity within unity.

[19] Merritt Ruhlen,  The Origin of Language (New York: John Wiley, 1994), 7.

[20] The Oxford English Dictionary, 2^nd edition, prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), Volume XVI, 87.

[21] The Oxford Concise Dictionary of English Etymology , edited by Hoad  T.F. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 451.

[22] Collin’s Etymological Dictionary, school edition (London and Glasgow: Collin’s Clear Type Press), 326; Hensleigh Wedgwood, A Dictionary of English Etymology, 2nd edition (London: Trubner & Co., 1872), 622.

[23] Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. (Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company, 1966), 1479. See also: Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, An intermediate Greek-English Lexicon, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1889), 739. Here is a web-link to the specific entry. The link between the Indo-European stem giving ‘spaein’ in Greek, ‘to draw, stretch out’, whence the meaning of ‘a certain stretch, extent, area of ground, an expanse’ derives and can be traced back to the Doric ‘spadion’ and Attic ‘stadion’ is also attested in Ivor Leclerc, The Philosophy of Nature (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 91.

[24] In general, we are observing that a new way of speaking is diffusing between people of  the Italian or Spanish mother tongue, whose native language is influenced by terms taken from the English language: ‘Itanglish’ or ‘Spanglish’ are the terms that define this new phenomenon of ‘horizontal’ hybridization between languages.

[25] James P. T. Clackson, “Latin“, in The Ancient Languages of Europe, ed. Roger D. Woodard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 73.

[26] Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome, Vol. 1. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 238.

[27] Edward Ross Wharton, Etyma Latina (London: Rivingtons, 1890), 98.

[28] F. E. J. Valpy, An Etymological Dictionary of the Latin Language (London: printed by A.J. Valpy, sold by Baldwin and Co., 1838), 439.

[29] Anthony Rich, The Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary, and Greek Lexicon (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1849), 617.

[30] Herodotus, Histories, 2.149, in Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, revised and augmented throughout by Sir Henry Stuart Jones with the assistance of Roderick McKenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 1631.

[31] This question about the exact measure of the ‘stadion’ is highly debated, as we can read from the different lengths reported by The Oxford Classical Dictionary, edited by S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, Fourth Edition, Volume II, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), page 917. I mention two authors who have dealt with this specific issue extendedly: Donald Engels, “The Length of Eratosthenes’ Stade“, The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 106, No. 3, Autumn, 1985, 298-311. Martin Leake “On the Stade as a Linear Measure“, The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, Vol. 9, 1839, 1-25.

[32] Stephen G Miller, Ancient Greek Athletics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 31.

[33] Henry GeorgeLiddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 1631.

[34] Smith, William, Wayte William, Marindin G.E. (eds.). A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Third Edition, Vol. II. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1890), p. 161. See also: The Oxford Classical Dictionary, edited by S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, Fourth Edition. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 917.

[35] ‘The unit of superficial measure in Homer is the γύης (found only in the compounds πεντηκοντόγυος and τετράγυος), which probably meant the space traversed by the plough in one day’s work. It probably derived its name from the ancient form of the plough (called αὐτόγυον by Hesiod)’; see: Smith, William, Wayte William, Marindin G.E. (eds.), A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, p. 161. See also: Hesiod, Work and Days, 427, 436, in Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 361.

[36] William Smith, William Wayte and G.E. Marindin, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 161.

[37] The Oxford Classical Dictionary, edited by S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, Fourth Edition, Volume II. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 917.

[38] William Smith, William Wayte and G.E. Marindin, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 163.

[39] Martin Leake, On the Stade as a Linear Measure, 3.

[40] William Smith, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Second Edition (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1859), 752.

[41] William Smith, William Wayte and G.E. Marindin, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 162.

[42] Homer, Iliad. 10. 351- 352, translation by A.T. Murray.

[43] Stephen G. Miller, Ancient Greek Athletics, 32.

[44] This is the description of the ‘diaulos’ race by Professor Miller: ‘As indicated by the name, runners in the diaulos (“double channel” or “double-pipe”) ran in lanes, which were marked by lime, and turned around individual turning posts. Thus ancient authors would compare running the race to plowing a field, where the oxen pull the plow back and forth’. In Stephen G. Miller, Ancient Greek Athletics, 44.

[45] The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Volume XVI, prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 88.

[46] At this regard, in the text The Origin of Language written by the American linguist Merrit Ruhlen, we read that ‘the classification of languages into language families is based on discovering words in different languages that are similar in sound and meaning… The reason this method (of classification) is so successful is because it is based on the most fundamental property of human language, namely, that a word – any word in any language – is an arbitrary association of certain sounds with a certain meaning’ (pages 8, 11).

[47] I have taken the term diastemic space from Edward Casey. The concept of extension as a spatial notion was especially elaborated by the Roman poet Lucretius on the base of the old Greek notion ‘diastema’. See Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 84.

[48] The first thinkers who got a glimpse into the important connection between chōra and a concept of space understood as void extent where body roam or, more abstractly, as extent available for possible occupation were the latter-day Atomist Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) and the Stoic Chrysippus (280-206 B.C.). Together with Epicurus, his disciple, the Roman poet Lucretius (ca. 99-55 B.C.), also observed the intimate link between (i) extension, (ii) room as extent through which bodies room and (iii) the not yet fully-fledged (with respect to Lucretius’s own epoch) concept of space.  See: Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place, 83, 84, 86-87. See also the article Place and Space: A Philosophical History, which is a presentation of Casey’s book.

[49] Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993), 357.

[50] Ibid., 356.

[51] The term ‘reality’ comes from the Latin ‘realitas’, and ‘realis’ is what belongs to the ‘res’ – the thing – so that the real, or reality, ultimately consists in the modalities through which a thing exists, a quality of the thing, and not if that thing is present/actual or not. Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing ? (South Bend: Gateway Editions Ltd., 1976), 212. In the wake of Aristotle, we could say that ‘The modalities through which a thing exists’ can be actual or potential, that is concrete or abstract; in this respect, space is an abstract reality; place is a concrete reality.

[52] Goos Kroonen, Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 418.

[53] Ibid., 418.

[54] According to the ‘Etymological  Dictionary of Greek’ belonging to the Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series, ‘chōra’ means space, interspace, place, position, rank, location, region, estate, land, country’ but also ‘eye-hole’; while the variant form ‘chōros’  means ‘space, region, land’; see: Robert Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 1654.

[55] Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 83.

[56] James P. Mallory and Douglas Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2006), 287.

[57] Robert Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 1614; see also: Liddell and Scott,  A Greek-English Lexicon, 1981.

[58] Concerning the Proto-Germanic form *gaura- and the possible PIE reconstructions, see: Goos Kroonen, Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 172.

[59] Robert Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 1630-31, 1655.

[60] This notion, which regards space understood as an extension abstracted from the distance between concrete points or locales, is probably the first notion of space isolated in antiquity: at this regards, see Edward Casey’s The Fate of Place with respect to Epicurus. See also  Strato’s understanding of topos (place) as interval, or diastema, as well as Philiponus’s understanding of place as an extension (diastema) in three-dimension: these philosophical notions let us give a glimpse into the strong kinship between notions of place and space in the period of their formation. Casey, Edward S., The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, 84, 85, 94. At this regard, see also the article in this website Place and Space: A Philosophical History.

[61] To give you a term of comparison with respect to the double nature of space I’m speaking of, when Deleuze and Guattari speak about ‘smooth and striated’ spaces, they make explicit such original duality of meanings that intrinsically belongs to space understood according to its twofold connection (etymological and semantic) with ‘spadion’ and ‘stadion’. Gilles Deleuze  and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 474-500.

[62] On the PIE roots *sp, *spe(i), see: Klein Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. (Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company, 1966), 1479; on the PIE root *sph₁to-, and *sp(e)r-g,*sparg see: de Vaan, Michiel. Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages. (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 578; for *(s)peh₂, see Robert Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 1378.

On the PIE roots *(s)teh₂-; *steh₂– and *st(e)h₂-ti-, see: J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, p. 98, 285; see also: Robert Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, p. 1390-91. The root *st(h)a-, from the Indo-European base *sta is attested by Klein; see lemmas ‘stasis’, ‘state’, ‘stater’ or ’static; see Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 1506. On the same root *sta-, ‘to stand’ see also J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams, Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture (London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997), 542-43.

[63] The Proto-Germanic form *stadi is attested by the Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic; it means ‘place, town’ and from that root stem the Old English stede (place, spot, locality) the English stead, Dutch. stad , city, Old HighGerman stat, place, German stadt ‘city’. See: Goos Kroonen, Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic. (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 472.

[64] Martin Heidegger: ‘a distance, in Greek ‘stadion’, always has room made for it, and indeed by bare positions. The space that is thus made by positions is space of a peculiar sort. As distance, or ‘stadion’, it is what the same word, ‘stadion’, means in Latin, a ‘spatium’, an intervening space or interval’, in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993), 357.

[65] In the Etymological Dictionary of Greek, we read that σπάω (spao) means ‘to draw’, e.g., a sword, ‘to pull out, tear, drag, suck in, slurp down’ from the IE root *(s)peh₂– ‘draw’: in Robert Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Leiden: Brill, 2010), p. 1378. In A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English by Klein, we read that ‘space’ probably derives from the IE base *spe(i)- or *sp^e– meaning ‘to draw, stretch, span, spread, extend, swell, be successful’ whence the Greek σπάν (span) ‘to draw, to tear away’ derives; see: E. Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 1479.

[66] Robert Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 1378

[67] Roger D. Woodard, The Ancient Languages of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), map 1, between pages 49-50.

[68] Ibid., 14.

[69] Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 1631. Concerning the diffusion and localization of the Greek dialects, see Roger Woodard, The Ancient Languages of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 14-72.

[70] Sergei M. Eisenstein,  Lezioni di Regia (Torino: Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, 1964), 40-49.

[71] Julian B. Barbour, The Discovery of Dynamics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 295.

[72] Places are the result of processes: whenever a boundary if formed a place emerges as the result of its originating process, or system of processes. Then, the concept of boundary is a fundamental concept as well to explain reality, which is ultimately the result of the encounter between objects (objects, or things, are places – bounded entities, actually – in virtue of the physicochemical processes that sustain their existence as individual entities against other entities, which we usually understand as background) and subjects (subjects are places or bounded entities as well,  in virtue of the physicochemical and biological processes, at least, that sustain their existence; or to put it differently: subjects are the place of physicochemical and biological processes at least – think of the simplest living organisms, e.g., a virus or a bacterium). It is from the encounter between objects and ultimately between objects and subjects that concepts of place and space may be described; I use to say that reality – as system of all the existing processes – is a place actually; we need a language to express concepts referred to concrete as well as to abstract entities and concepts of place and space are useful to describe such complementary aspects of reality.

[73] The Oxford English Dictionary, 2^nd edition, prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), Volume XI, 937.

[74] See: The Oxford Concise Dictionary of English Etymology, edited by Hoad  T.F. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 355; Collin’s Etymological Dictionary, school edition (London and Glasgow: Collin’s Clear Type Press), 263.

[75] J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2006), 297.

[76] Robert Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 1205.

[77] I believe the peculiar character of extension as attribute of place and as mode of distinction between actual and ideal beings, or entities, has some similitude with the positions held by the Neoplatonic Simplicius and with the Damascian idea of ‘place as metron’; see Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 91, 97-98.

[78] The English linguist and classical scholar John Chadwick said: ‘there is a problem about the origin of this word (topos), since it is absent from early epic and it appears first in Attic tragedy, where is regularly used by all three tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides)’, in: John Chadwick, Lexicographica Graeca (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 280. Professor Keimpe Algra explicitly says: ‘in written sources the term “topos” is not encountered before Aeschylus”, in Algra, Concepts of Space in Greek Thought, 33. See also: Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 1806.

[79] Robert Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 1494.

[80] Pierre Chantraine, Dictionnaire Etymologique de la Langue Grecque, 1125.

[81] John Chadwick, Lexicographica Graeca (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 280.

[82] See: the Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd edition, Volume XVI, edited by P.G.W. Glare. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 1039; Michiel de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 347.

[83] Michiel de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, p. 347.

[84] J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World,  287, 295.

[85] Ibid., 98.

[86] Ibid,. see table 6.3, 97-99.

[87] Ibid., 93-96.

[88] Ibid., see paragraph 18.4 and table 18.4, 295.

[89] For the Greek stele from stello, see: Robert Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 1404.

[90] Goos Kroonen, Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 472.

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Image Credits

Featured Image on pikist.com

Image 3 by Robin Iversen Rönnlund.

Image 7 by Forgemind ArchiMedia

Image 12 (source), retrieved from Sergei M. Eisenstein’s book, Lezioni di Regia (see note 70, above)

Image 16 (sorce), retrieved from Julian B. Barbour’s text, The Discovery of Dynamics (see note 71, above).

Images 1, 2, 4, 5, 8-10, 14, 15, 17 by Alessandro Calvi Rollino, CC BY-NC-SA