seh₂wl̥-
“salt, mineral seasoning”salt, salted
Root for salt, yielding Latin sal, Greek hals, English salt, Old English sealt.
Discussion
The PIE noun *seh₂wl̥- (salt — with various stem formations across the branches) names the mineral that was, alongside honey, the most economically important non-food substance in the ancient IE world. Salt preserved meat, flavoured grain, and served as currency — and the word's descendants encode this economic centrality in vocabularies of money, health, and social value.
Latin sāl (salt) continues the root directly and generated one of the most celebrated etymological chains in English: salary (salārium, originally the salt-allowance paid to Roman soldiers — though scholars debate whether this was literally a ration of salt or a monetary allowance for purchasing it), sauce (salsa, "the salted thing" — condiment as salt-delivery vehicle), sausage (salsīcius, "made with salt" — the preserved meat), salad (from Vulgar Latin salāta, "salted" — vegetables dressed with salt), and salsa (the same word as sauce, reborrowed from Spanish). The English word salt itself descends from Old English sealt, from PGmc *saltą, from the same PIE root.
Greek háls (ἅλς, "salt, sea") preserves the root with the expected Greek treatment and gave English: halogen ("salt-producing" — the elements that form salts), halite (rock salt), and halo (originally a threshing floor, then a circular disk — the connection to salt is indirect).
The economic centrates: salt was so valuable in the ancient world that it functioned as money. The salary connection encodes this directly: Roman soldiers were paid partly in salt or salt-money, and the expression "worth your salt" preserves the ancient equation of salt with earned value. The Latin via salāria ("salt road") was one of the oldest Roman roads, connecting Rome to the Adriatic salt pans — infrastructure built for the salt trade that preceded the empire.
Sanskrit sálila- (salty, briny) and the related forms confirm the Indo-Iranian reflex. Old Irish salann (salt) and Lithuanian sólymas (brine) provide Celtic and Baltic attestation. Old Church Slavonic solĭ (salt) continues the Slavic reflex.
The word's universal preservation — in every major IE branch, with the same meaning — reflects salt's irreplaceable role in food preservation before refrigeration. The PIE speakers who named this mineral could not have known that their word would generate the vocabulary of employment (salary), gastronomy (sauce, salsa, sausage, salad), and chemistry (halogen) — but the centrality of salt to their economy ensured the word's survival across every transformation of their culture.
Notes
Pokorny 878-879. English salt, salary, salad, sauce.