Smoke and scent is ancient — and in reaching back in the etymological bridge to the past — you will find that fume is drawn from the Proto Indo European *dhumo. The PIE are primeval tongues, and fume, in the distant and ancient heart of our seed languages, is Sanskrit: dhumah, Old Church Slavic: dymu, the Lithuanian: dumai, Old Prussian dumis “smoke,” the Middle Iranian dumacha, or “fog,” and finally the bridge from the ancient world to the “modern” — Greek: thymos which is “spirit, mind, soul”. These are ancient words, expressions which thrived centuries before the Greco-Roman era. The bridge to the Latin, fumare, “to smoke, steam” and to the Old French — fum “smoke, steam, vapor” is a more recent positioning — 600 years back, to 1000 years ago. But that underlying concept of a scent mist or fog — that might be many centuries before the common era. And by the conceptual and linguistic bridges of centuries, smoke, reek, funk, toke, smog, smother, smolder, camouflage, dust, flue, vaporize and yen — there are strings.
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