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CLPadvocate | 1 month ago

from Indoeuropean "gwen" over scandinavian "kvinna" = Woman

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shantara|1 month ago

Thank you. I knew “woman” is “kvinder” in Danish, but I never made the connection with the English word for “queen”.

memsom|1 month ago

"Queen" came from "The king and his queen". There is no common word for Queen in Germanic languages, and for what ever reason Queen became synonymous with royalty. Originally it just mean "the king and his woman", but I don't know when it changed. Certainly we had more than one word for "adult female human" in old English.

aitchnyu|1 month ago

Did Japanese get a similar word by coincidence?

pjc50|1 month ago

https://jisho.org/search/queen : which word did you mean?

The translator's curse of a language having lots of synonyms, the subtleties of which don't map directly on to English. None of those seem particularly similar to queen/kvinne?

DonaldFisk|1 month ago

Another cognate is Classical Greek γυνή, whence gynaecology.