I had always thought it a strange coincidence that in Japanese, sunday is 'sun day' and monday is 'moon day'.
At least in japanese, the other days of the week are also associated with celestial bodies, tuesday 'fire day', wednesday 'water day', thursday 'wood day', friday 'gold day', and saturday 'dirt day'.
mars: fire planet
mercury: water planet
jupiter: wood planet
venus: gold planet
saturn: dirt planet
If you're familiar with any romance language, the days of the week associate correctly with the names of the planets (martis, mercurii, jovis); and in english the rough translations into anglo-saxon/norse gods applies (tyr/tiw, thor, freija)
Apparently it's unlikely to be an accident, but it's a very ancient connection, via the chinese, who have in more recent times ditched the system.
> The Chinese had apparently adopted the seven-day week from the Hellenistic system by the 4th century, although by which route is not entirely clear. It was again transmitted to China in the 8th century by Manichaeans, via the country of Kang (a Central Asian polity near Samarkand).[20] The 4th-century date, according to the Cihai encyclopedia,[year needed] is due to a reference to Fan Ning (范寧), an astrologer of the Jin Dynasty. The renewed adoption from Manichaeans in the 8th century (Tang Dynasty) is documented with the writings of the Chinese Buddhist monk Yijing and the Ceylonese Buddhist monk Bu Kong.
> The Chinese transliteration of the planetary system was soon brought to Japan by the Japanese monk Kobo Daishi; surviving diaries of the Japanese statesman Fujiwara no Michinaga show the seven-day system in use in Heian Period Japan as early as 1007. In Japan, the seven-day system was kept in use (for astrological purposes) until its promotion to a full-fledged (Western-style) calendrical basis during the Meiji era. In China, with the founding of the Republic of China in 1911, Monday through Saturday in China are now named after the luminaries implicitly with the numbers.
Interestingly, the more ancient Chinese system of ten-day weeks still survives in modern usage to refer to the early / middle / late parts of a month, 上旬 / 中旬 / 下旬.
> At least in japanese, the other days of the week are also associated with celestial bodies
The naming scheme also holds for French, except for Saturday (samedi [0]) and Sunday(dimanche [1]), which originates from "Day of Shabbat" and "Day of the Lord". But according to wikipedia [0], samedi replaced the "Day of Saturn".
Domingo comes from Dominicus, or "belonging to the Lord" as in French, or the Italian "Domenica". All share the same etymology
"Sábado" is Spanish for Shabat as is Sabato in Italian
(I'm sure other romance languages are similar, even Portuguese, that has Sábado and Domingo, but the rest of the days are numbered from 2nd to 6th, oddly enough)
> via the chinese, who have in more recent times ditched the system.
What? They use the same seven-day week today.
They name the days "one", "two", "three", etc, which was actually an innovation by Christian missionaries in China, not the Chinese themselves. The seventh day is named "day" rather than being numbered, so that the full name is 礼拜天 "the day of worship", anchoring the week firmly to the Christian week.
(The same effort to rename the days of the week along more Christian lines was also made in Europe, but it didn't take there.)
> the rough translations into anglo-saxon/norse gods applies (tyr/tiw, thor, freija)
I was kind of amused to see "anglo-saxon/norse" followed by "tyr/tiw"; Tyr is the Norse form and Tiw is the English form.
(The goddess honored by Friday was Frig in English, and Thor is of course Thunor -- his name is nothing but the ordinary word "thunder".)
This sounds very similar to the naming scheme used in Portuguese, which interestingly differs from Spanish. In Portuguese the five workdays are numbered starting from two, because the first day is Sunday which isn't numbered but has - like Saturday - its own name.
Sort of. Etymologically, you're correct that 火曜日 originates as the term 火曜-日, the day (日) of the fire light (火曜).
But I don't think even most Japanese people are aware of this today; the only common use of 曜 is its use in the name of every weekday, so people think of 火曜日 as being segmented 火-曜日, the weekday ("曜日", etymologically spurious) of fire (火).
I don't know the modern Japanese word for Mars, but in Chinese it's 火星, not 火曜.
> Apparently it's unlikely to be an accident, but it's a very ancient connection, via the chinese, who have in more recent times ditched the system.
China is a relative latecomer here and typically lags these types of ancient civilizational innovations, with the oldest being Mesopotamia and Egypt. In China, the seven day week was adopted in the late 4th Century A.D. in the Jin dynasty roughly 3000 years after it was adopted in Mesopotamia.
There are two theories as to the origin of the seven day week, one that it started in ancient Babylon and another that it started in ancient Egypt.
The concept of a "week" is directly tied to the concept of a sabbath (a special holy day to mark the end of the week). This, in turn is related to Babylonian numerical systems -- they had a base 6 system corresponding to 6 days of work followed by the religious day, and hence the origin of our seven day week. Interestingly, unlike in judaism where the seventh day is considered one in which work was forbidden as God rested on that week, in Babylonian tradition, the seventh day was considered unlucky for work and thus work was to be avoided. It is a fine line separating these different notions of a Sabbath and thus of the week.
Another speculated origin for the week was via lunar observations -- e.g. a quarter phase of the moon corresponding to a half-moon either waxing or waning with a lunar month being roughly 29.5 days, so 1/4 of that would be 7.4 days. But there are different ways to divide this -- e.g. a sequence of 7 day units followed by a sequence of special days tacked at the end or some other combination. You actually see these types of divisions in some ancient Babylonian calendars. But with a base 6 system, there are some nice divisions, e.g.
6 days of work followed by the holy day = 1 week
4 weeks followed by a holy day at the end = 1 month
the residual .5 day, can accumulate so that after 12 months, 12*.5 = 6. 6 special days to be added at the end of 12 months.
In the ancient past, you had different regions practicing their own calendar system and one of the first innovations of the first (known) empire in Mesopotamia was the standardization of weeks and months as different cities were brought into the Sumerian empire. Sargon I of Akkad is said to have standardized the week by ensuring that the different cities he conquered were synced up and observed the same set of extra holy days in what is the first (known) empire
However there is some linguistic evidence that the Sumerians merely borrowed the concept of a week from the Akkadian civilization, so the earlier Akkadian civilization is believed to have held the concept of a week first.
Once you have the notion of a week, it is not hard to name it after the sun, moon, and 5 celestial planets, as these were the primary astronomical phenomena. You can see these names in ancient languages here: https://www.hermetic.ch/cal_stud/hlwc/why_seven.htm
> In China, the seven day week was adopted in the late 4th Century A.D. in the Jin dynasty
I think this needs a citation. I've never seen any mention of 7-day weeks in historical Chinese texts. Systems of 7-day weeks might be known by Chinese by this time due to cultural and religious exchanges with the West, but claims that it was "adopted" is news to me. My impression is that the current 7 day week system adopted in China is a very recent phenomenon, i.e. presumably not earlier than the 19th century, and mostly due to the work of Christian missionaries. (... I could be wrong though, I haven't read that much post-Jin texts...)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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!"
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.
My favourite is idiot and idiomatic, both coming from the word ἴδιος - literally meaning one's own. While idiot usually implies someone lacking intelligence, an ῐ̓δῐώτης (idiotes) is a person who lacks perspective, namely, one that is not their own.
In other words, an idiot is someone so caught up in their own perspective they are incapable of engaging in fruitful public conversation. Don't know what Plato would think of Twitter then . . .
This might be more of a modern reanalysis based on etymology. The sense development in Greek was apparently more like “private (non-political) person” > ”layperson” > “ignorant” > “stupid”.
My favorite insight lately comes from looking at the letter ell. Hebrew lamedh. Familiar to programmers, a 'lambda' function is a nameless function.
Looking at a translation of the lords prayer, wondering where the word 'hallowed' came in, since it wouldn't have been part of the original language, I delved into why hallow was the substitute for sacred, and what the origins of 'sacred' were.
Sacere, a set-aside area, so so something set aside is 'sacred'. To hallow something is to hold it in high regard, to respect it, to put it in another category other than the normal one.
The hebrews had seven holy names and EL was one of them. Imagine if you time traveled back to that time and asked random people in the fertile crescent, who or what do you worship? They technically couldn't answer that because their beliefs told them not to say that word, but they COULD say the ____
the ____
el (blank)
the the
EL EL? I worship the ____ (cant say it, leave a blank)
A blank? Like a hollow? A word with a separate category? A set-aside-area? Sacere. Sacred. So, our father hallowed be thy name is like saying you have a separate category for that name. What is the normal category for all the normal words? You can say them and you can write them. What is special about the 'sacred' words? You don't say them.
> Imagine if you time traveled back to that time and asked random people in the fertile crescent, who or what do you worship? They technically couldn't answer that because their beliefs told them not to say that word
The tradition of not pronouncing the name YHWH is specific to rabbinic judaism and was not a feature of either temple judaism as practiced in the era of King David nor religions in the fertile crescent.
Rather the opposite, as names of Gods were loudly and proudly proclaimed. We know this because of poems (which were sung outloud) composed that contain names of gods in such a way as proper pronounciaton is required for the songs to have the right rhythm and meter. (This is also how modern scholars believe the correct pronounciation is "Yahweh", e.g. that the vav was a "w" sound and the yod was a "y" sound.) In fact the very idea of a name that could be written but not spoken presupposes a tradition of reading and writing texts -- something practiced by Masoretes and Pharisees -- rather than a service consisting of songs and spoken ceremonies as performed in actual temples.
It is a question as to which extra-levitical sects initially began this tradition of omitting the name in spoken pronunciation sometime during the second temple period, as it was most likely related to them not being priests and thus not considering themselves worthy to say the name, but when the priestly service ended and the temple was destroyed, guardianship of law passed to rabbinical groups focused on working with texts, and then no one was considered worthy to say the name and thus it became a general prohibition even though the royal singers singing the psalms loudly sang "Yahweh" in almost every song in daily service.
But this practice of omitting the name was not shared by other semitic groups in the region, nor is it present in Arabic cultures. So let's not backpropagate that relatively modern scholarly tradition to religious practices in the fertile crescent during the dawn of civilization.
The distinction between "hallow" and "sacred" is a distinction that arises only due to the traditional of English translations. Sacere is the Latin. Lord's prayer is written in Koine Greek and uses ἁγιάζω (hagiadzo), the verbal form of ἅγιος (hagios). Hagios is the by far the most common word for "holy".
While modern translations are extremely good, publishers are apparently hesitant to modify verses prone to memorization or used in liturgies (such as the Lord's prayer),
Hallowed is a very apt translation, the hebrew word קדוש (which I think is the one that means hallowed?) can also be translated as "sperated"; "separated/holy" is pretty much the dictionary definition of hallowed
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".
"suture" and "sutra" are cognates in Latin and Sanskrit respectively. A sutra सूत्र is literally a thread or fibre. This also explains why it was calqued into Chinese as 經 (among other meanings, "weave").
Similarly, "joust" and "juxtapose" are cognates via French and neo-Latinate French respectively (ultimately from iūxtā, a Latin preposition meaning "near", "next to").
However, my most favourite pair of surprising cognates that I discovered recently is "durian" (the fruit) and "iwi" (a word loaned from Maori into New Zealand English meaning "tribe"). This one goes way back into Proto-Austronesian...
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!
Ikura in sushi restaurants always makes me think of ikra (икра), which is caviar in Russian. It can't be a coincidence but I don't know how it got there.
Hmm - the Google-translated version of that page says that Russian POWs in the Russo-Japanese war used salmon roe (i.e. ikura) as a substitute for caviar. Interesting—thanks!
It maybe makes a bit more sense when you consider 'икра' doesn't just mean caviar but alsо fish roe in general and is also applied even more broadly in entirely fishless things like 'икра балкажанная'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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".
I know I'm being pedantic here but if you're going to insist on writing Greek words with Greek letters you need to stop writing Latin words with the modern "u".
The choice between “v” and “u” is pretty arbitrary. “V” was easier for inscriptions because of the straight lines but in Latin cursive “U” was used as a more rounded form that’s easier to write. What’s inconsistent with ancient usage is the mixing of V and U.
I’ve never understood why we kept V but got rid of J. It would make more sense to distinguish either both or neither.
Latin used the V for both V and U today, right? How did those two get separated? Why did we get "virus" and not "virvs" or "uirus"? I guess they were pronounced differently back then too?
> It’s really a pet peeve of mine when I hear people pronounce Latin words starting with v and using the modern English v. It’s pronounced as w.
It's a little more complicated. The Romans didn't distinguish the sounds. But that doesn't mean they always produced a sound that you would recognize as W. Sometimes they did, sometimes not. You can observe the same effect easily in modern languages with the same non-distinction -- for example, in modern Mandarin, 问 formally begins with a W sound, but in practice often begins with what I hear as a V.
(For extra interest, contrast Old English, in which -- like modern Mandarin -- /f/ and /w/ were phonemes while /v/ was not, but -- unlike Mandarin -- [v] was a variety of /f/, not of /w/.)
They used the same letter for two sounds in the sense that it had a consonantal use and a vowel use. But they did not, themselves, perceive the two sounds as being different sounds. They are, to the Romans, one sound in two different contexts.
Quoting Vox Latina:
> There is also a much-quoted anecdote of Cicero's, which tells how, when Marcus Crassus was setting out on an ill-fated expedition against the Parthians, a seller of Caunean figs was crying out 'Cauneas!'; and Cicero comments [...] that it would have been well for Crassus if he had heeded the 'omen', viz. 'Caue ne eas'; this hardly makes sense unless, as we presume, the [consonantal] u of caue was similar to the [vocalic] u of Cauneas. A parallel case is provided by Varro's etymology of auris from auere
(The book is accurate in representing the Latin spelling as being identical for the consonant and the vowel; in fact they used V and U is a much later invention. Perhaps the book felt English speakers would have more trouble accepting V as a vowel than U as a consonant.)
> But they did not, themselves, perceive the two sounds as being different sounds.
This makes sense, thanks. I guess we generally don't perceive the different sounds in our languages, like an English speaker generally won't perceive the difference between t͟hə and t͟hē (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/the for audio).
For what it's worth, the sounds really are similar. The technical term for W [w] and Y [j] is "semivowels" (or "glides"); they are pronounced like vowels with no obstruction of airflow.
Just finding Latin verbs and adding different prefixes is also a fun way to find etymologically related words. Some examples: (English is not my native language, so I don't know how obvious they are to native English speakers / people who didn't learn some Latin in school.)
iacere = to throw
* inject: to throw in (could be a vaccine injection, or e.g. data injected in a program)
* eject: to throw out
* reject: to throw back
* abject: to thow away => cast aside => despicable ("abject coward") => miserable ("abject poverty")
* conjecture: something thrown together
* interject: to throw inbetween
* subject: throw under => something placed underneath something else ("a British subject", the subject of a sentence, "subject to terms and conditions", the subject of a paper)
* object: thrown against/facing => to expose => something tangible/material
* objective: a material object => not influenced by emotions but based on observed facts
vs subjective: subject to emotions/personal opinions
* objective: thrown against/facing => goal
* trajectory: to throw accross
* project: to throw forth
* adjective: to throw towards => something added/additional => an adjective
* jet: a "throw" => a jet e.g. of water => a spout that jets
=> jet engine => a jet (plane with jet engines)
=> jet set (lifestyle of people that can travel for pleasure)
legere = to choose, to collect/gather, to read
* elect, elective (optional), elite ("chosen out"), 1337 (= leet, from elite), elegant
* select
* collect
* lecture, college, lector, lectern, lesson
* neglect
* intellect, intelligent (originally "discerning", literally "choose between")
* diligent (to choose apart)
* legion (a collection of soldiers in the Roman army, now also meaning "numerous")
* legend: "that which must be read"
Who would've thought the words 1337, elegant, lesson, and legend are related? Or superjet and adjective?
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.
Finnish word "Norsu" means elephant but there are no nor have there been since at least after last ice-age Elephants in those northern latitudes. So whence the word "Norsu", which does not seem to be a word in any other language?
Well it is explained below. Turns out that Finns had another word "Marsu" for walrus, which also have tusks. So therefore they started using a similar word for a (somewhat) similar animal.
The Finnish word for walrus, mursu, was borrowed into Finnish from Sámi, as mentioned in the WordSense article. The Northern Sámi word morša is likely a loanword from some Palaeo-Laplandic language, borrowed when the Proto-Sámi language spread to Lapland during the Iron Age.[1]
As there are no walruses in Finland, it was nearly as mysterious a creature as an elephant to Finns, who mostly encountered only walrus tusks and walrus hides through trading.[2]
Russian borrowed the word for walrus морж from some Sámi or some Finnic language, as the Russian expansion to the Arctic Ocean is historically much later than the Sámi and Finnic settlement in the area. [2] From Russian, the word got borrowed into French as morse.
Btw, you had a typo in the name of the animal. marsu means "a guinea pig" in Finnish, borrowed from Swedish marsvin (literally "a sea pig"), which in turn comes from German.
No, it's not as simple as that.
Finnish and the Slavic languages are the only ones in Europe that have a native word for "elephant". (Everyone else uses variants of the Greek "elephas" or Arabic "fil".)
The question is, why those two languages and only those two?
What's worse, the Slavic word dates to proto-Slavic times, it's one of the basic animal words like "deer", "rabbit", "cow", etc.!
Just wanted to mention that!
In Serbian (and most other south Slavic languages) we use a word слон (slon) for elephant. I was always wondering why is that, how can we have native word for the animal we could hardly had chance to see.
However, there’s some evidence that (south) Slavic people lived somewhere near India. And India is mentioned a lot in some of the tradional folk poems. There’s even a town in Serbia called Inđija.
Really interesting stuff, but not sure how credible that theory is.
> Finnish and the Slavic languages are the only ones in Europe that have a native word for "elephant". (Everyone else uses variants of the Greek "elephas" or Arabic "fil".)
So the only languages in Europe except the other language in Europe? :)
> from Greek elephas (genitive elephantos) "elephant; ivory," probably from a non-Indo-European language, likely via Phoenician (compare Hamitic elu "elephant," source of the word for it in many Semitic languages, or possibly from Sanskrit ibhah "elephant").
So the Greek word is not necessarily native to Greek.
While I am amused by auto-antonyms, and words that mean opposite things while having the same root, I never found them to be surprising, because being the complete opposite of something is actually related to that something, akin to the bitwise "not" operation.
I listened to The Blindboy Podcast episode “Manchán Magan”[0] (The name of the interviewee, author of an etymology book[1]) yesterday and some of the stories were about shared words.
A fun example of the opposite – a pair of very similar words that have totally different etymologies – are "carouse" and "carousel". The former comes via French from German "gar aus", an exclamation with the same meaning as "drink up" in English (literally, "quite out"). The latter, on the other hand, also comes via French but from Italian, and originally means a type of military drill or display executed by horsemen.
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).
Unfortunately, this isn't correct according to my sources -- Italian anno < Latin annus < PIE h₂t-nó-s from a root h₂t- "to go", while ano < Latin anus < PIE *h₁eh₂no- "ring".
The existence of Gothic aþnam (athnam) “years (dative)” and Oscan “akno-“ [1] strongly suggests the presence of a consonant in there, which supports the separate root theory.
That's the English Wiktionary and it doesn't cite any sources. The paper etymological dictionary I've checked gives both theories and a number of references for each.
Not who you replied to, but it's consistent with basically other source I can find. I'm inclined to believe that the root for year is indeed different, based on the suggested cognates in other languages.
I can't confirm it, but I've studied language and etymology a ton, and I think there is a hidden etymology between "man" (referring to humanity as a whole) and the mama/mom/mammary cluster. Hear me out.
"Ma" is virtually always the first sound a baby makes, and is also reminiscent of breastfeeding, with the lips pursing together. It's widely hypothesized that because of this, the word for "mother" in nearly every language on the planet is some variant of "ma(m)".
"Da" and "pa" are the next-easiest sounds to make. Hence, "dada/papa" for father (originally pH₂tér in PIE, where h2 is the "a-colored laryngeal).
Anyway, we have the word "man", related to the Latin "homo", which is suspiciously close to "mama". Nowadays, "man" (and the Italian "uomo") has mostly masculine connotation. But it strikes me as really weird how close it is to such a feminine phoneme. My headcannon is that "mam" is the root of words referring to both "mother" (the first human a baby experiences) and "humanity" as a whole.
It's hard to tease apart the influence of "guma"/dhghem, the PIE for earth. Also related to "Adam" (as in "Adam and Eve") who was famously made from Earth...yes Genesis is essentially based around a giant pun in Hebrew.
Mama/dada/adamah/humana - they all swirl around the same phonetic space, and I don't think this is a coincidence.
Etymologies of various profanities and swearwords can be fun to look up. Not so much in English, but it's kinda amazing how many Slavic swearwords still have recognizable proto-Indo-European roots in them.
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”).
At least in japanese, the other days of the week are also associated with celestial bodies, tuesday 'fire day', wednesday 'water day', thursday 'wood day', friday 'gold day', and saturday 'dirt day'.
mars: fire planet
mercury: water planet
jupiter: wood planet
venus: gold planet
saturn: dirt planet
If you're familiar with any romance language, the days of the week associate correctly with the names of the planets (martis, mercurii, jovis); and in english the rough translations into anglo-saxon/norse gods applies (tyr/tiw, thor, freija)
Apparently it's unlikely to be an accident, but it's a very ancient connection, via the chinese, who have in more recent times ditched the system.