satem

adj.
Designating those Indo-European languages, including the Indo-Iranian, Armenian, and Balto-Slavic subfamilies, in which original palatal velar stops became fricatives (as k' > s or š) and labiovelar stops became plain velars (as kw > k).

[Avestan satəm, hundred (a word whose initial sound illustrates the change).]

from Avestan
This word originated in Iran

English has not needed to import numbers from any other language. We still count one, two, three...one hundred as the Angles and Saxons did, and before them our Germanic ancestors. Yet one of the words of English is satem, the word for "one hundred" in Avestan, the ancient language of Zoroastrianism.

It's not because any ancient Persians have opened currency exchanges or schools of mathematics in English-speaking countries. Nor have English speakers been listening to Zoroastrians counting aloud. Instead, satem was imported by scholars who study the history of the Indo-European language family. Shortly before 1900, a German scholar named von Bradke observed a neat geographical division among Indo-European languages. Western Indo-European languages used words beginning with a k sound, like Latin centum, for the number 100, while Eastern languages of the Indo-European family named their hundreds with words beginning with s, like Avestan satem. The pairing of western k and eastern s was also found in numerous other words. Von Bradke called the two branches centum and satem, respectively. The centum languages include the Celtic, Germanic, Italic, and Greek branches of Indo-European; the satem ones include Slavic and Indo-Iranian. (In the Germanic languages, including English, the k sound developed into h, as in hundred.) Scholarly discussion of centum and satem languages took place in English as early as 1901.

Unfortunately, this perfectly neat division was spoiled by the discovery of records of an ancient and very far eastern Indo-European language, Tocharian, which is somewhat like centum languages and somewhat like satem. But it is still convenient to be able to label the two major branches as centum and satem.

Avestan is the language of Avesta, the scripture of the ancient Zoroastrian religion founded more than three thousand years ago by Zoroaster or Zarathustra. It was the dominant religion of the Persian empires and is still practiced nowadays in Iran and India. The Zoroastrian writings keep Avestan alive, but it is no one's native language nowadays. The only word that has come direct from Avestan into English is satem, but it is also possibly the source of Persian words that have made their way into English, including baksheesh (1775), a tip, kiosk (1625), and paradise (1175).

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