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.
> 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".
> 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".)
> 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
> 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."
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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
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.
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.
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")
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.
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.
[+] [-] dnautics|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] xiaq|4 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] jlg23|4 years ago|reply
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".
[0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samedi
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimanche
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|4 years ago|reply
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".)
[+] [-] skhr0680|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jolmg|4 years ago|reply
Maybe for the second one you meant "names of the planets"?
[+] [-] rsj_hn|4 years ago|reply
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
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1179/0308018827898012...
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
[+] [-] uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] SamBam|4 years ago|reply
> "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
[+] [-] canjobear|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielDe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] programmer_dude|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] armandososa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jun8|4 years ago|reply
Some pairs I found interesting from that book:
[+] [-] hprotagonist|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jfk13|4 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] Tagbert|4 years ago|reply
From this, I learned that “white” and “black” are cognate with an IE root that meant both burning and burned.
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
[+] [-] decuran|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|4 years ago|reply
Fun fact: the Latin word for "in vain" is frustra.
[+] [-] carlob|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schoen|4 years ago|reply
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. :-)
[+] [-] Grustaf|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] leipert|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] PennRobotics|4 years ago|reply
Related: Be mindful when your Denglish tempts you to say, "Danke für das Gift!"
[+] [-] DanielDe|4 years ago|reply
> Benches were used as makeshift desks or exchange counters during the Renaissance by Florentine bankers
[+] [-] tragomaskhalos|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlos|4 years ago|reply
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 . . .
[+] [-] stevula|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dustractor|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] captaincrowbar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kortex|4 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] asveikau|4 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] gfaure|4 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] karaterobot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KoftaBob|4 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
https://www.google.com/search?q=ikura&tbm=isch
https://www.google.com/search?q=икра&tbm=isch
[+] [-] jfengel|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Jiocus|4 years ago|reply
“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.
[+] [-] msrenee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JackFr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bloak|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Grustaf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] russellbeattie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] narag|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schoen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asveikau|4 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] reactspa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d_tr|4 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] AndrewOMartin|4 years ago|reply
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