English is my second language and Latin my third. While the latter is not as useful as learning Spanish or French in day to day communication, it really helped my English capabilities as a lot of words in English are Latin based.
My favorite etymological thing is the German „Bank“ which can mean bench or bank. Funnily enough the financial institution is a loan via the Italian „banca“ but that itself goes back to the same old Germanic root as the bench you sit on.
According to wiktionary it comes from „banca rotta“ where rotta goes back to Latin „rumpere“ which means „to break“. Whereas the English rotten or the German go back to old Norse „rutna“ (to rot). The two don’t share the same root.
The difference between German's Gift (poison) and the English gift (a present) amuses me. Evidently, they both derive from something being given e.g. a lethal dosage, in the German case.
Related: Be mindful when your Denglish tempts you to say, "Danke für das Gift!"
My favorite shared etymology is "guest" and "hostile", along with "host" both in the sense of "person who hosts a guest" and "an army". They both go back to a Latin word meaning "stranger".
Cross-language ones are also fun. I like that the German word for poison is "Gift", which etymologically means "something given". Makes for some good puns.
This is a very clever approach to determining these automatically. There is a field of Computational Humor and I suspect you could combine this with a GPT-3-type mechanism to make some good jokes.
> Cross-language ones are also fun. I like that the German word for poison is "Gift", which etymologically means "something given". Makes for some good puns.
“Gift” means poison in Swedish as well, and adding to that, it also means “married”. When I was a kid (before I really understood that words are shared) I remember feeling worried about some friends of the family that were about to get married. From the sound of it, I thought something bad was about to happen.
I had simply learned, in quite sensible order, the meaning of poison before married.
I'm pretty sure "guest" comes from Old Norse, not Latin. And hostile came from Latin through French. They've got the same PIE root though, which is what's interesting. Same root, just from before the germanic and romance languages split off PIE.
The notion is of "separation" from the body (compare Latin excrementum, from excernere "to separate," Old English scearn "dung, muck," from scieran "to cut, shear;" see sharn). It is thus a cousin to science and conscience.
Interesting... though for what it's worth, the Oxford English Dictionary doesn't confirm that origin for "science". Once you get back to scīre 'to know', it says "of unknown origin":
> Etymology: < Anglo-Norman cience, sience, Anglo-Norman and Middle French science (French science) knowledge, understanding, secular knowledge, knowledge derived from experience, study, or reflection, acquired skill or ability, knowledge as granted by God (12th cent. in Old French), the collective body of knowledge in a particular field or sphere (13th cent.) < classical Latin scientia knowledge, knowledge as opposed to belief, understanding, expert knowledge, particular branch of knowledge, learning, erudition < scient- , sciēns, present participle of scīre to know, of unknown origin + -ia -ia suffix¹.
Not claiming the OED is right and etymonline is wrong, of course (it could equally well be the other way around); just noting that this may not be a universally accepted etymology.
The word science definitely comes from scio - to know, but it seems correct that shit and science ultimately come from the same proto indo-european root, *skei.
I think the American Heritage Dictionary (1969) was the first general dictionary to show reconstructed Indo-European etymologies for English words [1, 2]. That’s where I learned about the supposed common origin of “science” and “shit,” more than forty years ago.
The first and second editions of the OED did not show many (any?) Indo-European roots, at least as far as I can recall, and they may not have been incorporated fully yet into the current online edition either. It’s also possible that the OED editors are cautious about accepting Indo-European etymologies, which are reconstructed rather than based on written evidence.
Can someone explain to a non-native speaker what’s surprising about this?
> The leap from a word meaning "imaginary" to a word meaning "fantastic" struck me as odd initially, but apparently it comes from the sense of the word "imaginary" as "unreal".
What other sense is there that Wiktionary doesn’t know about?
My primary association with the word "fantastic" is simply "great" or "very good", as in "you did a fantastic job!". It's this meaning of the word that I found oddly disconnected from the word "imaginary". How do you get from something meaning "not real" to something meaning "very good"?
But the word "unreal" helped me make the leap, since that's a word I would use to describe something I thought was "very cool" or "well done".
"Fantastical" is probably more used for that nowadays (and that very rarely), but it didn't occur to me that there could be any other explanation, as in Greek we use "fantastic" for both meanings commonly, ie "fantastic job" and "fantastic world" (imaginary world).
My favorite example of similar words with seemingly-unrelated meanings is "capitulate" (surrender) and "recapitulate" (repeat or summarize).
Turns out that they both derive from "caput" (head) in its sense of chapter or heading, due to the formal process of surrendering in war, which involved drafting a document explicating the terms of surrender which was divided into chapters.
However, although Wiktionary gives the etymology of "grime" as "from Proto-Germanic grīmô (“mask”)", it also says: "Possibly influenced by Danish grim (“soot, grime”), Old Dutch grijmsel, Middle Dutch grime, Middle Low German greme (“dirt”)." The former goes back to "Proto-Indo-European gʰrēy- (“to paint, streak, smear”), from gʰer- (“to rub, stroke”)", which is also the origin of "Christ", but the latter goes back to "Proto-Indo-European gʰrem- (“to resound; thunder”)". According to Wiktionary. But that doesn't really make much sense, does it? I think there must be a mistake in there somewhere.
Amusingly, "Grim" is also one of the names of the Norse god Odin, presumably because he wore a mask. (Is that perhaps mentioned in the film "The mask"?) So Christ and Odin have the same name, sort of.
To find out more cognates and some of the history of how those words evolved, I recommend the History of English podcast. You’ll get language history and etymology as well as lots of social and historical drivers for those changes.
From this, I learned that “white” and “black” are cognate with an IE root that meant both burning and burned.
> These words all descend from the Greek "karkinos", meaning "crab", which became "cancer" in Latin.
> "Cancer" later took on an alternative meaning, "enclosure", because of the way a crab's pincers form a circle.
I am not an expert, but I think this may be backwards. I think the original meaning was circle, from which both the "enclose" meaning and the "crab" meaning (because the pincers form a circle or an enclosure) derive.
wiktionary [1] has the most in-depth etymology I can find, and has for "cancer" (meaning crab) the etymology is: karkros (“enclosure”) (because the pincers of a crab form a circle), from Proto-Indo-European kr-kr- (“circular”), reduplication of Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- (“to turn, bend”) in the sense of "enclosure", and as such a doublet of carcer. Cognate with curvus.
Anyway, that aside, I felt stupid not having realized the etymology of "cancel," since in Italian (one of my languages) "cancello" means "gate."
Grimm's Law was a sound change that turned k into h when Proto-Germanic split off from Proto-Indo-European. The original form was something like *kwel which turned into *hwel in Proto-Germanic, then eventually wheel in English and hjul in Scandinavian languages.
The other words (chakra, circle, cycle) are from some kind of reduplicated form like *kwekwlos, via different routes.
Thanks! It reminds me of how western Norwegians (Bergen, Stavanger etc) say a hard K sound when I think a H sound would be “normal”. Maybe they just never changed?
> In Sweden/DK/NO we call it “hjul” which is pronounced like the American nicotine vape brand juul, quite similar to English
I can't quite tell, but if you're saying that the American brand Juul is pronounced in English as if it were the word "you'll", that is not correct. Americans don't think of the letter J that way.
(If you're saying Nordic hjul and English wheel are similar, they are cognates.)
That should be the least surprising. Sanskrit (especially the Vedic stage) preserves a tremendous number of old Indo European forms and is often used as a sort of validity check for PIE etymologies.
Along these lines, the words "male" and "female" came to English from Latin along totally different paths, even though they seem like they'd have been created together.
Skipping through several stages of English and French, the derivation is:
male < Latin masculus < mas “male (animal)”
female < Latina femella < femina “woman”
masculus and femella are diminutives of mas and femina respectively.
I think the key bit is that "fe-" is not some sort of prefix, but part of a totally different word that had its spelling changed for consistency. This is unlike the "wo-" in woman, which in fact a prefix originally meaning "wife".
Weirdly, English got "man" from Old German (meaning a person), but "human" from the Latin "homo", so just like female, the "hu-" in human isn't a prefix either, but derived from a totally different word.
Then again, "man" extends back to proto-Indo-
European, so maybe it's all related regardless.
Wow! Wiktionary suggests that the Franks (from whom these derive) themselves were named after a word for "spear".
An amazing one that I've found striking for a while and that also involves an ethnic group is
ciao - slave - Slav
> Borrowed from Italian ciao (“hello, goodbye”), from Venetian ciao (“hello, goodbye, your (humble) servant”), from Venetian s-ciao / s-ciavo (“servant, slave”), from Medieval Latin sclavus (“Slav, slave”), related also to Italian schiavo, English Slav, slave and Old Venetian S-ciavón ("Slav"), from Latin Sclavonia (“Slavonia”).
The etymology of the Slavs' autonym itself is much more disputed, but possibly derives from the Slavic word for "word", so meaning "people who can talk", among several totally different suggestions. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/s...
> The etymology of the Slavs' autonym itself is much more disputed, but possibly derives from the Slavic word for "word", so meaning "people who can talk", among several totally different suggestions.
Well in pretty much every Slavic language analog of "słowo" is "word" and "słowianin" is Slav. And in most of these languages the word for Germans (the most common non-Slavic foreigners) is analog of "Niemiec" which is the same word root as "mute person" (niemy).
The Wiktionary quick summary of why it's disputed is one researcher's assertion that "slověne can't be formed from slovo because -ěninъ, -aninъ only occurs in derivations from place names". (Maybe słowianin < slověninъ is an exception, but you can see where someone might be skeptical if it's supposedly the only* exception!)
Sometimes etymologies that feel super-logical turn out to be more complicated historically. In many of these cases, the later perception that two words were related influenced their subsequent meaning or spelling, even if they were originally not related.
As a non-speaker of Slavic languages, I'm pretty convinced about the "word" connection, especially with the example you mentioned about the Germans being called "non-talkers", since it's not very unusual for ethnic groups' autonyms to mean something like "speakers". But there are lots of etymologies that feel natural and straightforward and are later shown to have a folk etymological component.
Indeed I can't find in Polish any other singular -anin not derived from place, But słowianin in plural is słowianie, and there's lots of -anie words not derived from places.
For example abstract nouns formed from verbs, like:
pisanie (writing) from pisać (to write)
palenie (smoking) from palić (to burn)
śniadanie (breakfast) from archaic śniadać (to eat)
jedzenie (food) from modern jeść (to eat)
bieganie (running) from biec (to run)
etc. There's easily hundreds of these.
Then it would be
słowianie (abstract noun for people who can talk) from archaic słowić (to express in words)
The only weird thing would be that słowianie is plural and all of the other -anie nouns made from verbs are singular.
From which we get Wales, Cornwall, Gaul, Walloon, and Wallachia. Originally the name of a particular tribe, but came to refer to angry foreign neighbours more generally.
There was a great puzzle in the MIT Mystery Hunt this year about calques between Latin and Greek, where words would be literally equivalent if you translated them morpheme-by-morpheme. While this is sometimes a source of etymology (because someone consciously translated a foreign word this way), in this case it was just a source of humor because the particular calques in the puzzle are not equivalents.
The example I most remember is "suppository" (from Latin) and "hypothesis" (from Greek), both literally meaning 'put under'. (The actual etymological calque would be "supposition".)
As https://devjoe.appspot.com/huntindex/ isn't updated with 2021 puzzles yet, I don't know how to find the specific puzzle I'm thinking of to show the other examples. :-)
Well, isn't Latin a whole cloth calque of Greek anyway...
But that aside, if you're interested in calques, checkout Old Church Slavonic, they calqued massive amounts of Greek words, rather than going the lazy route of English and just borrowing them. They hade the same issue, no way to express these complex religious ideas, but solved it in different way. A lot of these words are still used in modern slavic languages.
преображение = transfiguration (pre-obrazhenie, pere = through, obraz = image)
Богородица = Θεοτόκος (bogoroditsa, bog = god, rodit' = give birth)
I especially love that S:t John Chrysostomos is called Ioann Zlatoust (Golden mouth) and Constantinople is Tsargrad or Konstantinograd.
Different from what? You were mentioning that Latin calques of Greek are common, which is my impression too (ἀνά-στασις → re-surrectio, ὑπό-στασις -> sub-stantia, and non-religious συμ-πάθεια → com-passio).
I mean that in English they just took the Greek or Latin word and anglicized it a bit, but in OCS they mostly calqued more complex words.
Some common words were borrowed though, like gospel which is евангелии - evangeli.
Chinese and more traditional Japanese is also good at calquing or inventing new words, instead of borrowing, like computer in Chinese being called electrobrain, or orthodox in Japanese is sei-kyou, meaning correct church or something like that.
Of course Japanese is basically made up of Chinese calques and ancient loanwords, which is also a fascinating story.
Just to nitpick a bit, it's евангелие - evangelieh. Well, in Russian it is. I just realized you were talking about old church Slavonic. I just saw modern Cyrillic and went straight to Russian. As far as I can figure out without any clue about OCS, it still seems like you're missing the last syllable there.
Yeh-van-gel'-ee-ay to be more precise. I really suck at transliterating. With a hard G "guh" sound, rather than the kind of soft G/J sound it has in English. I need to learn IPA.
Yes this is the Russian form, but all those words are usually very similar in Russian and the latest Russian forms of Church Slavic, there are many varieties for different times and places and the one used in the Russian church today feels closer to modern Russian than to something like Codex Suprasliensis.
As to the transcription, sure it wasn’t precise (and yeah it ends with an e in singular) Nowadays it of course starts with YE but it’s not really clear if that was always the case, looking at etymology resources like Fasmer: http://expositions.nlr.ru/ex_manus/Ostromir_Gospel/index.php
My favourite in Spanish (but I think English speakers can relate) is "botica" (pharmacy) and "bodega" (cellar), both from Greek apotheke (basement, literally "under-box")
Or imagine asking the pharmacist for wine :) In Spanish "bodega" is specifically where wine is made or kept. I'm aware that in English it's used for convenience stores. Just a different joke.
Actually, "apo" has the meaning of "away" here, so "away-box" would be more accurate. Maybe you are confusing it with "ypo", which actually means "under" in Greek?
Spanish has tons of double imports from Latin. Words that follow the normal phonetic evolution going from Latin to Spanish, then parallel words re-imported from latin later.
Some I can think of offhand are the ones with the consonant + l -> ll change:
Plano + llano
Clave + llave
Pleno + lleno
I think there are some others where Latin vowels like /o/ or /e/ change to diphthongs like /we/ or /je/ and they get re-imported with /o/ or /e/ again. I can't think of examples of this right now but I am sure they exist. [Edit: foco + fuego is one such example]
Probably others with word initial /f/ put to silent h, then re-imported with an f again.
German speakers can also relate, with "apotheke". Interestingly, apotheke in modern Greek means "storage room", pharmacy is "pharmakeio". Ypotheke does mean mortgage in modern Greek too.
In ancient Greek too. They invented the thing. The Romans had a similar legal contract, but adopted the term to avoid confusion with other lending practices.
As dt_r pointed, apotheke always meant "away room" so it makes sense to think that it got the new meaning because of context: it surely was imported alongside other Greek terms about drugs.
I love this! I had no idea about the Etymological Wordnet and it probably would have saved me a ton of time developing my app for finding "interesting" cognates: https://etymologyexplorer.com
I've always loved the same thing—finding hidden connections between everyday words. I recently did this with "vain". It comes from Latin vanus, meaning "empty". More obvious with the "in vain" meaning, but the modern day comes from the idea of an exaggerated self image, with no substance behind it. It has a ton of "empty" cognates: vanish, evanescence, vanity (table), vaunt, vacuous, vacuum, vacation, void, devastate, wanton, wane
Super cool! This reminds me of a fascinating fact I learned the other day, about the history of the Coptic language in Egypt (the final stage of the Egyptian language before Arabic was introduced):
The Phoenician alphabet was heavily based on Ancient Egyptian hieroglyph script. The Greek alphabet was in turn originally based on the Phoenician alphabet. Finally, the Coptic alphabet was based on Greek, bringing it full circle back to Egypt!
Do stationary (not moving) and stationery (paper, envelopes and stuff) count?
Roving peddlers were the norm in the Middle Ages; sellers with a fixed location often were bookshops licensed by universities; hence the word acquired a more specific sense than its etymological one.
This is not true [1], it's a line from the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding which doesn't even mention the etymology of "winter": "Ah, of course! Kimono is come from the Greek word cheimonas which is mean winter. So what do you wear in the wintertime to stay warm? A robe."
Kimono is 着物 which transliterates to “wear-thing.” It’s the word for clothes, not just the traditional robes, and it’s not etymologically related to a word for Winter in any language.
Japanese has many -mono words based on verbs: tabemono 食べ物 is food (eat-thing), nomimono 飲み物 is a beverage (drink-thing), tatemono 建物 is a building (build-thing), kudamono 果物 is fruit (reward-thing; the Japanese word for “to fruit” being related to the verb for achieving, similar to English “come to fruition”).
The Latin cadō root had multiple meanings, like "fall", "die" and "decay". So while "cadaver" is obvious, "casual" took a circuitous route of "fall" -> "accident" -> "by chance", and eventually "informal".
My favourite example of apparently unrelated words with an unexpected common root: "government" and "cybernetics" both come from the Greek "kubernetes" (helmsman).
You start to notice a lot of roots by applying a "toki pona" style phonetic rule: collapse all voiced and unvoiced consonants. Reverse Grimm's law. Th -> t. And then apply Arabic vowels: a, i, u. This is pretty much reversing the most common sound shifts over time.
f=v=b=p, g=k, d=t, y=o=u, e=i.
Cybernetics -> kupirnitics
Government -> kupirnit
It's probably also related to "operatus" (Latin for "work", things like cooperate and opera come from it) but I can't find sources. (co)operatus -> (k)upiratus
That doesn't seem plausible to me when you consider that opera is the plural of opus. Afaik in early latin, /s/ often went to /r/ when it fell between vowels. That is why it has /s/ in the nominative but /r/ when you start to inflect it with suffices.
This happens a lot for third declension nouns where nominative ends in -s (opus is one such example)
Other examples of this pattern:
Corpus -> corporem (not *corpusem)
Venus -> Venerem (not *Venusem)
Flos -> florem (not *flosem)
Colos -> colorem (not *colosem)
Or more simply, we can look at opus and see it comes from a different PIE root from cyber. (When i look it up, the former has a root meaning "work", and the latter has a root meaning "turn")
I was under the impression that the underlying /r/ became [s] in the nominative case where it was followed by an /s/, rather than -- as you seem to suggest -- an underlying /s/ becoming [r] when intervocalic.
How do you explain the prefixed form in Latin (co-operatus) corresponding to the root form in other languages? Opus/operis is a productive form on its own in Latin.
When Latin borrowed the root of "govern" from Greek, it was a nautical term, to steer.
We have a tendency to think of "cy" as an S followed by an "ai" diphthong. But if we consider the "c" as a hard /k/ and the "y" as a vowel similar to /u/, there isn't a huge difference between "cyber" and "guber", the latter form showing up in Latin and ultimately in English words like "gubernatorial".
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 357 ms ] threadMy favorite etymological thing is the German „Bank“ which can mean bench or bank. Funnily enough the financial institution is a loan via the Italian „banca“ but that itself goes back to the same old Germanic root as the bench you sit on.
> Benches were used as makeshift desks or exchange counters during the Renaissance by Florentine bankers
According to wiktionary it comes from „banca rotta“ where rotta goes back to Latin „rumpere“ which means „to break“. Whereas the English rotten or the German go back to old Norse „rutna“ (to rot). The two don’t share the same root.
Related: Be mindful when your Denglish tempts you to say, "Danke für das Gift!"
Cross-language ones are also fun. I like that the German word for poison is "Gift", which etymologically means "something given". Makes for some good puns.
This is a very clever approach to determining these automatically. There is a field of Computational Humor and I suspect you could combine this with a GPT-3-type mechanism to make some good jokes.
“Gift” means poison in Swedish as well, and adding to that, it also means “married”. When I was a kid (before I really understood that words are shared) I remember feeling worried about some friends of the family that were about to get married. From the sound of it, I thought something bad was about to happen.
I had simply learned, in quite sensible order, the meaning of poison before married.
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=shit
The notion is of "separation" from the body (compare Latin excrementum, from excernere "to separate," Old English scearn "dung, muck," from scieran "to cut, shear;" see sharn). It is thus a cousin to science and conscience.
> Etymology: < Anglo-Norman cience, sience, Anglo-Norman and Middle French science (French science) knowledge, understanding, secular knowledge, knowledge derived from experience, study, or reflection, acquired skill or ability, knowledge as granted by God (12th cent. in Old French), the collective body of knowledge in a particular field or sphere (13th cent.) < classical Latin scientia knowledge, knowledge as opposed to belief, understanding, expert knowledge, particular branch of knowledge, learning, erudition < scient- , sciēns, present participle of scīre to know, of unknown origin + -ia -ia suffix¹.
Not claiming the OED is right and etymonline is wrong, of course (it could equally well be the other way around); just noting that this may not be a universally accepted etymology.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/science https://www.etymonline.com/word/shit
The first and second editions of the OED did not show many (any?) Indo-European roots, at least as far as I can recall, and they may not have been incorporated fully yet into the current online edition either. It’s also possible that the OED editors are cautious about accepting Indo-European etymologies, which are reconstructed rather than based on written evidence.
[1] https://www.ahdictionary.com/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Heritage_Dictiona...
Some pairs I found interesting from that book:
> The leap from a word meaning "imaginary" to a word meaning "fantastic" struck me as odd initially, but apparently it comes from the sense of the word "imaginary" as "unreal".
What other sense is there that Wiktionary doesn’t know about?
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/imaginary
My primary association with the word "fantastic" is simply "great" or "very good", as in "you did a fantastic job!". It's this meaning of the word that I found oddly disconnected from the word "imaginary". How do you get from something meaning "not real" to something meaning "very good"?
But the word "unreal" helped me make the leap, since that's a word I would use to describe something I thought was "very cool" or "well done".
Like "fantastic voyage", "fantastic beliefs", "fantastic visions".
"Fantastic" also means "based on fantasy", so the leap to "imaginary" is short.
The link between "fantastic" and "phenotype" was surprising to me, even though it makes sense reading it.
Turns out that they both derive from "caput" (head) in its sense of chapter or heading, due to the formal process of surrendering in war, which involved drafting a document explicating the terms of surrender which was divided into chapters.
- Defense (protecting something)
- Fencing (protecting yourself with a sword)
- Fence (a wall that protects your property)
- Fence (someone who buys stolen goods which allows the thief to protect themselves from getting caught)
However, although Wiktionary gives the etymology of "grime" as "from Proto-Germanic grīmô (“mask”)", it also says: "Possibly influenced by Danish grim (“soot, grime”), Old Dutch grijmsel, Middle Dutch grime, Middle Low German greme (“dirt”)." The former goes back to "Proto-Indo-European gʰrēy- (“to paint, streak, smear”), from gʰer- (“to rub, stroke”)", which is also the origin of "Christ", but the latter goes back to "Proto-Indo-European gʰrem- (“to resound; thunder”)". According to Wiktionary. But that doesn't really make much sense, does it? I think there must be a mistake in there somewhere.
Amusingly, "Grim" is also one of the names of the Norse god Odin, presumably because he wore a mask. (Is that perhaps mentioned in the film "The mask"?) So Christ and Odin have the same name, sort of.
Stick that in your non-Asgardian pipe and smoke it, Neo!
From this, I learned that “white” and “black” are cognate with an IE root that meant both burning and burned.
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
> "Cancer" later took on an alternative meaning, "enclosure", because of the way a crab's pincers form a circle.
I am not an expert, but I think this may be backwards. I think the original meaning was circle, from which both the "enclose" meaning and the "crab" meaning (because the pincers form a circle or an enclosure) derive.
wiktionary [1] has the most in-depth etymology I can find, and has for "cancer" (meaning crab) the etymology is: karkros (“enclosure”) (because the pincers of a crab form a circle), from Proto-Indo-European kr-kr- (“circular”), reduplication of Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- (“to turn, bend”) in the sense of "enclosure", and as such a doublet of carcer. Cognate with curvus.
Anyway, that aside, I felt stupid not having realized the etymology of "cancel," since in Italian (one of my languages) "cancello" means "gate."
1. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cancer#Latin
The other words (chakra, circle, cycle) are from some kind of reduplicated form like *kwekwlos, via different routes.
I can't quite tell, but if you're saying that the American brand Juul is pronounced in English as if it were the word "you'll", that is not correct. Americans don't think of the letter J that way.
(If you're saying Nordic hjul and English wheel are similar, they are cognates.)
masculus and femella are diminutives of mas and femina respectively.
Weirdly, English got "man" from Old German (meaning a person), but "human" from the Latin "homo", so just like female, the "hu-" in human isn't a prefix either, but derived from a totally different word.
Then again, "man" extends back to proto-Indo- European, so maybe it's all related regardless.
France - frank (being unencumbered in speech) - franchise (the right to vote)
An amazing one that I've found striking for a while and that also involves an ethnic group is
ciao - slave - Slav
> Borrowed from Italian ciao (“hello, goodbye”), from Venetian ciao (“hello, goodbye, your (humble) servant”), from Venetian s-ciao / s-ciavo (“servant, slave”), from Medieval Latin sclavus (“Slav, slave”), related also to Italian schiavo, English Slav, slave and Old Venetian S-ciavón ("Slav"), from Latin Sclavonia (“Slavonia”).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ciao#Etymology
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slave#English "because Slavs were often forced into slavery in the Middle Ages"
The etymology of the Slavs' autonym itself is much more disputed, but possibly derives from the Slavic word for "word", so meaning "people who can talk", among several totally different suggestions. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/s...
Well in pretty much every Slavic language analog of "słowo" is "word" and "słowianin" is Slav. And in most of these languages the word for Germans (the most common non-Slavic foreigners) is analog of "Niemiec" which is the same word root as "mute person" (niemy).
I don't see how it can be disputed.
Sometimes etymologies that feel super-logical turn out to be more complicated historically. In many of these cases, the later perception that two words were related influenced their subsequent meaning or spelling, even if they were originally not related.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paronymic_attraction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology#Productive_forc...
As a non-speaker of Slavic languages, I'm pretty convinced about the "word" connection, especially with the example you mentioned about the Germans being called "non-talkers", since it's not very unusual for ethnic groups' autonyms to mean something like "speakers". But there are lots of etymologies that feel natural and straightforward and are later shown to have a folk etymological component.
For example abstract nouns formed from verbs, like:
pisanie (writing) from pisać (to write)
palenie (smoking) from palić (to burn)
śniadanie (breakfast) from archaic śniadać (to eat)
jedzenie (food) from modern jeść (to eat)
bieganie (running) from biec (to run)
etc. There's easily hundreds of these.
Then it would be
słowianie (abstract noun for people who can talk) from archaic słowić (to express in words)
The only weird thing would be that słowianie is plural and all of the other -anie nouns made from verbs are singular.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-anie#Polish
without stating whether they're etymologically related. It would also be good to know whether both exist in other Slavic languages.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-anin#Polish
has another example in Serbo-Croatian, which in turn has a different suffix corresponding to Polish -anie:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-anje#Serbo-Croatian
I don't know any of these languages, so I don't have any intuitions about this.
That is only one possible origin. The other one is "frec" (greedy, bold, brave).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic...
From which we get Wales, Cornwall, Gaul, Walloon, and Wallachia. Originally the name of a particular tribe, but came to refer to angry foreign neighbours more generally.
The example I most remember is "suppository" (from Latin) and "hypothesis" (from Greek), both literally meaning 'put under'. (The actual etymological calque would be "supposition".)
As https://devjoe.appspot.com/huntindex/ isn't updated with 2021 puzzles yet, I don't know how to find the specific puzzle I'm thinking of to show the other examples. :-)
But that aside, if you're interested in calques, checkout Old Church Slavonic, they calqued massive amounts of Greek words, rather than going the lazy route of English and just borrowing them. They hade the same issue, no way to express these complex religious ideas, but solved it in different way. A lot of these words are still used in modern slavic languages.
преображение = transfiguration (pre-obrazhenie, pere = through, obraz = image)
Богородица = Θεοτόκος (bogoroditsa, bog = god, rodit' = give birth)
I especially love that S:t John Chrysostomos is called Ioann Zlatoust (Golden mouth) and Constantinople is Tsargrad or Konstantinograd.
> but solved it in different way
Different from what? You were mentioning that Latin calques of Greek are common, which is my impression too (ἀνά-στασις → re-surrectio, ὑπό-στασις -> sub-stantia, and non-religious συμ-πάθεια → com-passio).
Some common words were borrowed though, like gospel which is евангелии - evangeli.
Chinese and more traditional Japanese is also good at calquing or inventing new words, instead of borrowing, like computer in Chinese being called electrobrain, or orthodox in Japanese is sei-kyou, meaning correct church or something like that.
Of course Japanese is basically made up of Chinese calques and ancient loanwords, which is also a fascinating story.
As to the transcription, sure it wasn’t precise (and yeah it ends with an e in singular) Nowadays it of course starts with YE but it’s not really clear if that was always the case, looking at etymology resources like Fasmer: http://expositions.nlr.ru/ex_manus/Ostromir_Gospel/index.php
Theophilus (Gottlieb) is Amadeus in Latin.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart%27s_name
Actually, "apo" has the meaning of "away" here, so "away-box" would be more accurate. Maybe you are confusing it with "ypo", which actually means "under" in Greek?
I always enjoy reading about this stuff, btw!
Anything with the "teca" (or "theque" in other languages) has some relation, like modern discoteca or biblioteca = library.
Some I can think of offhand are the ones with the consonant + l -> ll change:
Plano + llano
Clave + llave
Pleno + lleno
I think there are some others where Latin vowels like /o/ or /e/ change to diphthongs like /we/ or /je/ and they get re-imported with /o/ or /e/ again. I can't think of examples of this right now but I am sure they exist. [Edit: foco + fuego is one such example]
Probably others with word initial /f/ put to silent h, then re-imported with an f again.
Wiktionary has a long list of these here:
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Spani...
As dt_r pointed, apotheke always meant "away room" so it makes sense to think that it got the new meaning because of context: it surely was imported alongside other Greek terms about drugs.
I've always loved the same thing—finding hidden connections between everyday words. I recently did this with "vain". It comes from Latin vanus, meaning "empty". More obvious with the "in vain" meaning, but the modern day comes from the idea of an exaggerated self image, with no substance behind it. It has a ton of "empty" cognates: vanish, evanescence, vanity (table), vaunt, vacuous, vacuum, vacation, void, devastate, wanton, wane
Fun fact: the Latin word for "in vain" is frustra.
Explains how "ciao" comes from "servus" via "schiavo", meaning slave or servant.
It's also related to words in other languages meaning fame, word, and language.
The Phoenician alphabet was heavily based on Ancient Egyptian hieroglyph script. The Greek alphabet was in turn originally based on the Phoenician alphabet. Finally, the Coptic alphabet was based on Greek, bringing it full circle back to Egypt!
Roving peddlers were the norm in the Middle Ages; sellers with a fixed location often were bookshops licensed by universities; hence the word acquired a more specific sense than its etymological one.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/stationer
[1] https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=QQovEeLHVl0C&pg=PA115&lp...
Japanese has many -mono words based on verbs: tabemono 食べ物 is food (eat-thing), nomimono 飲み物 is a beverage (drink-thing), tatemono 建物 is a building (build-thing), kudamono 果物 is fruit (reward-thing; the Japanese word for “to fruit” being related to the verb for achieving, similar to English “come to fruition”).
The Latin cadō root had multiple meanings, like "fall", "die" and "decay". So while "cadaver" is obvious, "casual" took a circuitous route of "fall" -> "accident" -> "by chance", and eventually "informal".
f=v=b=p, g=k, d=t, y=o=u, e=i.
Cybernetics -> kupirnitics
Government -> kupirnit
It's probably also related to "operatus" (Latin for "work", things like cooperate and opera come from it) but I can't find sources. (co)operatus -> (k)upiratus
Another example is the famous "father" etymology:
Father/vader/pater -> patir (PIE *pH₂tér)
This happens a lot for third declension nouns where nominative ends in -s (opus is one such example)
Other examples of this pattern:
Corpus -> corporem (not *corpusem)
Venus -> Venerem (not *Venusem)
Flos -> florem (not *flosem)
Colos -> colorem (not *colosem)
Or more simply, we can look at opus and see it comes from a different PIE root from cyber. (When i look it up, the former has a root meaning "work", and the latter has a root meaning "turn")
The comparative method proves the original phoneme was /s/ in many cases:
generis - compare Greek gene(s)os, Sanskrit janasas
jus, juris - compare justitia where the /s/ was not intervocalic
robur (archaic robos), roboris - compare robustus
The 3rd declension has many s-stems like these though there are some original r-stems also like jecur (< PIE jekwor, compare Greek hepar).
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhotacism
We have a tendency to think of "cy" as an S followed by an "ai" diphthong. But if we consider the "c" as a hard /k/ and the "y" as a vowel similar to /u/, there isn't a huge difference between "cyber" and "guber", the latter form showing up in Latin and ultimately in English words like "gubernatorial".
Yoga literally means union and is derived from a prefix yuj meaning to attach, join, harness, yoke.