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@yvanspijk
Foreign doors
The word foreign is etymologically related to door.
Foreign comes from Latin forānus (‘outsider’), a derivative of forīs (‘outside’). It got its silent g because people believed it had something to do with reign – which it doesn’t. English door is a distant cousin of forīs.
Within Germanic, it’s related to German Tür and Swedish dörr, but these do stem from slightly different Proto-Germanic words. My infographic tells you more.
Foreign doors
The word foreign is etymologically related to door.
Foreign comes from Latin forānus (‘outsider’), a derivative of forīs (‘outside’). It got its silent g because people believed it had something to do with reign – which it doesn’t. English door is a distant cousin of forīs.
Within Germanic, it’s related to German Tür and Swedish dörr, but these do stem from slightly different Proto-Germanic words. My infographic tells you more.
Foreign doors
The word foreign is etymologically related to door.
Foreign comes from Latin forānus (‘outsider’), a derivative of forīs (‘outside’). It got its silent g because people believed it had something to do with reign – which it doesn’t. English door is a distant cousin of forīs.
Within Germanic, it’s related to German Tür and Swedish dörr, but these do stem from slightly different Proto-Germanic words. My infographic tells you more.
From from from where?
The Spanish way of saying ‘from where’ is de donde. However, to speakers living a thousand years ago, that would’ve meant ‘from from from where’.
In Old Spanish, ‘from where’ was simply onde, a descendant of Latin unde. However, this word would end up getting reinforced by de (‘from’) twice because of an interesting series of ambiguities.
Click my new infographic to see how it happened.
From from from where?
The Spanish way of saying ‘from where’ is de donde. However, to speakers living a thousand years ago, that would’ve meant ‘from from from where’.
In Old Spanish, ‘from where’ was simply onde, a descendant of Latin unde. However, this word would end up getting reinforced by de (‘from’) twice because of an interesting series of ambiguities.
Click my new infographic to see how it happened.
Usted, você & vostè
Spanish ‘usted’ and Portuguese ‘você’, words meaning “you”, don’t look much alike, but they have the same origin: Latin ‘vostram + mercēdem’, literally “your mercy”.
Click my new graphic to learn all about their fascinating history – in which no Arabic was involved, contrary to a persistent myth.
If you like my graphics, please consider subscribing to my Patreon. 😊
Chez casa mia
Chez moi is the French way of saying ‘at my place’. The preposition chez has a fascinating origin: it comes from the same word as Spanish casa (‘house’): Latin casa.
Casa originally meant ‘hut’, but it was destined for a great future: it would become the common word for ‘house’ in almost all Romance languages.
What was the original Latin word for ‘house’ and what happened to it? And where does the current French word maison come from? My new infographic tells you all about it and shows a wide selection of Romance descendants of Latin casa.
A quick bio of vital words
The word quick has many surprising relatives.
It’s related to vital, vivid, and Spanish vivir (to live) via Latin, and to bio- and zoo via Ancient Greek.
Germanic relatives include Dutch kweken (to grow; to foster) and German keck (sassy).
Zoom in on my new infographic to learn how these words are related:
North & south
The French words nord and sud look a lot like English north and south.
That’s not a coincidence: it’s because Old French borrowed these words from Old English norþ and sūþ – along with est and ouest, which come from ēast and west. The other Romance languages later adopted these words from French.
My new infographic tells you all about the fascinating theories about the history of north, south and their cognates.
Next time: east and west.
East & west
The French words est and ouest look a lot like English east and west.
That’s because they were borrowed from Old English, along with other nautical terms, which points to naval contacts. French then passed on est and ouest, as well as nord and sud, to the other Romance languages.
My new graphic tells you how we know Old English was the donor language, how east is related to aurora, and why west may have orignally meant ‘where the sun sets’.
If you’re looking for the stories of north and south, please see Friday’s post.
Indo-European youth
The English word young has surprising cognates in other languages in its Indo-European family.
Irish óg and Welsh ifanc mean ‘young’ but don’t resemble young at all, while Italian giovenco means ‘young bull’.
More distantly, young is related to youth, juvenile, junior, Spanish joven, French jeune, and more.
Click my new graphic to discover more about this word family.
Indo-European youth
The English word young has surprising cognates in other languages in its Indo-European family.
Irish óg and Welsh ifanc mean ‘young’ but don’t resemble young at all, while Italian giovenco means ‘young bull’.
More distantly, young is related to youth, juvenile, junior, Spanish joven, French jeune, and more.
Click my new graphic to discover more about this word family.
East & west
The French words est and ouest look a lot like English east and west.
That’s because they were borrowed from Old English, along with other nautical terms, which points to naval contacts. French then passed on est and ouest, as well as nord and sud, to the other Romance languages.
My new graphic tells you how we know Old English was the donor language, how east is related to aurora, and why west may have orignally meant ‘where the sun sets’.
If you’re looking for the stories of north and south, please see Friday’s post.
North & south
The French words nord and sud look a lot like English north and south.
That’s not a coincidence: it’s because Old French borrowed these words from Old English norþ and sūþ – along with est and ouest, which come from ēast and west. The other Romance languages later adopted these words from French.
My new infographic tells you all about the fascinating theories about the history of north, south and their cognates.
Next time: east and west.
The seasons of Romance
The Spanish words primavera (spring) and verano (summer) both derive from Latin vēr (spring).
Originally, primavera was early spring, while verano was late spring.
However, their meanings shifted to later in the year, and estío, the original word for summer, was dethroned.
That’s not the only interesting story the Romance words for the seasons have to tell. Click my new infographic to learn all about the four seasons in the five largest Romance languages.
Unexpected cognates
The word town shares its origin with German Zaun (‘fence’) and Dutch tuin (‘garden’), even though their forms and meanings are quite different. They all stem form Proto-Germanic *tūnan, whose meaning is reconstructed as ‘fenced area’. Over the course of 2000 years, they’ve grown apart.
My new graphic shows nine unexpected but true cognates in English, German, Dutch, Frisian, and Swedish.
In the article on my Patreon (850 words, tier 1), I explain how the meanings of these nine words group diverged over time.
Early Latin borrowings: food
After my infographic about words such as wall, street, and kitchen, which are very early Germanic borrowings from Latin, here’s a second one, this time about food. While words such as carnivore, cereal and, edible are late and obvious borrowings from Latin, words such as cheese, pear,and wine were adopted from that language 2000-1500 years ago, when the Romans occupied the parts of Europe where the ancestor of English was spoken.
Next episode: utensils!
How do we know that the words featured in these infographics were borrowed? Couldn’t they just be the native Germanic cognates of the Latin words? There are several ways we can identify them as borrowings. You’ll learn all about them in the short article on my Patreon.