Surprising Shared Word Etymologies

I had always thought it a strange coincidence that in Japanese, sunday is &#x27;sun day&#x27; and monday is &#x27;moon day&#x27;.<p>At least in japanese, the other days of the week are also associated with celestial bodies, tuesday &#x27;fire day&#x27;, wednesday &#x27;water day&#x27;, thursday &#x27;wood day&#x27;, friday &#x27;gold day&#x27;, and saturday &#x27;dirt day&#x27;.<p>mars: fire planet<p>mercury: water planet<p>jupiter: wood planet<p>venus: gold planet<p>saturn: dirt planet<p>If you&#x27;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&#x2F;norse gods applies (tyr&#x2F;tiw, thor, freija)<p>Apparently it&#x27;s unlikely to be an accident, but it&#x27;s a very ancient connection, via the chinese, who have in more recent times ditched the system.

&gt; These words all descend from the Greek &quot;karkinos&quot;, meaning &quot;crab&quot;, which became &quot;cancer&quot; in Latin.<p>&gt; &quot;Cancer&quot; later took on an alternative meaning, &quot;enclosure&quot;, because of the way a crab&#x27;s pincers form a circle.<p>I am not an expert, but I think this may be backwards. I think the original meaning was circle, from which both the &quot;enclose&quot; meaning and the &quot;crab&quot; meaning (because the pincers form a circle or an enclosure) derive.<p>wiktionary [1] has the most in-depth etymology I can find, and has for &quot;cancer&quot; (meaning crab) the etymology is: <i>karkros (“enclosure”) (because the pincers of a crab form a circle), from Proto-Indo-European </i>kr-kr- (“circular”), reduplication of Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- (“to turn, bend”) in the sense of &quot;enclosure&quot;, and as such a doublet of carcer. Cognate with curvus.<p>Anyway, that aside, I felt stupid not having realized the etymology of &quot;cancel,&quot; since in Italian (one of my languages) &quot;cancello&quot; means &quot;gate.&quot;<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;cancer#Latin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;cancer#Latin</a>

If you like this sort of thing there’s a whole book on them that I found really enjoyable: <i>Dubious Doublets</i> by Stewart Edelstein.<p>Some pairs I found interesting from that book:<p><pre><code> * Aardvark - Porcelain * Brassiere - Pretzel (bonus: bracelet and embrace) * Bid - Buddha * Hieroglyphics - Clever * Zodiac - Whiskey</code></pre>

My favorite is &quot;shit&quot; and &quot;science&quot;, both of which have a root sense of &quot;to cleave or separate&quot;.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.etymonline.com&#x2F;search?q=shit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.etymonline.com&#x2F;search?q=shit</a><p><i>The notion is of &quot;separation&quot; from the body (compare Latin excrementum, from excernere &quot;to separate,&quot; Old English scearn &quot;dung, muck,&quot; from scieran &quot;to cut, shear;&quot; see sharn). It is thus a cousin to science and conscience.</i>

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.<p>From this, I learned that “white” and “black” are cognate with an IE root that meant both burning and burned.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;historyofenglishpodcast.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;historyofenglishpodcast.com&#x2F;</a>

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 &quot;interesting&quot; cognates: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;etymologyexplorer.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;etymologyexplorer.com</a><p>I&#x27;ve always loved the same thing—finding hidden connections between everyday words. I recently did this with &quot;vain&quot;. It comes from Latin vanus, meaning &quot;empty&quot;. More obvious with the &quot;in vain&quot; meaning, but the modern day comes from the idea of an exaggerated self image, with no substance behind it. It has a ton of &quot;empty&quot; 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 <i>not</i> equivalents.<p>The example I most remember is &quot;suppository&quot; (from Latin) and &quot;hypothesis&quot; (from Greek), both literally meaning &#x27;put under&#x27;. (The actual etymological calque would be &quot;supposition&quot;.)<p>As <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;devjoe.appspot.com&#x2F;huntindex&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;devjoe.appspot.com&#x2F;huntindex&#x2F;</a> isn&#x27;t updated with 2021 puzzles yet, I don&#x27;t know how to find the specific puzzle I&#x27;m thinking of to show the other examples. :-)

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.<p>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.

My favourite is idiot and idiomatic, both coming from the word ἴδιος - literally meaning one&#x27;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.<p>In other words, an idiot is someone so caught up in their own perspective they are incapable of engaging in fruitful public conversation. Don&#x27;t know what Plato would think of Twitter then . . .

My favorite insight lately comes from looking at the letter ell. Hebrew lamedh. Familiar to programmers, a &#x27;lambda&#x27; function is a nameless function.<p>Looking at a translation of the lords prayer, wondering where the word &#x27;hallowed&#x27; came in, since it wouldn&#x27;t have been part of the original language, I delved into why hallow was the substitute for sacred, and what the origins of &#x27;sacred&#x27; were.<p>Sacere, a set-aside area, so so something set aside is &#x27;sacred&#x27;. To hallow something is to hold it in high regard, to respect it, to put it in another category other than the normal one.<p>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&#x27;t answer that because their beliefs told them not to say that word, but they COULD say the ____<p>the ____<p>el (blank)<p>the the<p>EL EL? I worship the ____ (cant say it, leave a blank)<p>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 &#x27;sacred&#x27; words? You don&#x27;t say them.

My favourite example of apparently unrelated words with an unexpected common root: &quot;government&quot; and &quot;cybernetics&quot; both come from the Greek &quot;kubernetes&quot; (helmsman).

&quot;suture&quot; and &quot;sutra&quot; 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, &quot;weave&quot;).<p>Similarly, &quot;joust&quot; and &quot;juxtapose&quot; are cognates via French and neo-Latinate French respectively (ultimately from iūxtā, a Latin preposition meaning &quot;near&quot;, &quot;next to&quot;).<p>However, my most favourite pair of surprising cognates that I discovered recently is &quot;durian&quot; (the fruit) and &quot;iwi&quot; (a word loaned from Maori into New Zealand English meaning &quot;tribe&quot;). 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):<p>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&#x27;t be a coincidence but I don&#x27;t know how it got there.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=ikura&amp;tbm=isch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=ikura&amp;tbm=isch</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=икра&amp;tbm=isch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=икра&amp;tbm=isch</a>

My favorite shared etymology is &quot;guest&quot; and &quot;hostile&quot;, along with &quot;host&quot; both in the sense of &quot;person who hosts a guest&quot; and &quot;an army&quot;. They both go back to a Latin word meaning &quot;stranger&quot;.<p>Cross-language ones are also fun. I like that the German word for poison is &quot;Gift&quot;, which etymologically means &quot;something given&quot;. Makes for some good puns.<p>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.

“Christ” and “grime” both come from the proto Indo-European root for rub or smear. Christ as in anointing with oil, grimy from tubing in dirt.

Etymology is to linguistics what pyrotechnics are to chemistry, a gateway drug.

Along these lines, the words &quot;male&quot; and &quot;female&quot; came to English from Latin along totally different paths, even though they seem like they&#x27;d have been created together.

My favourite in Spanish (but I think English speakers can relate) is &quot;botica&quot; (pharmacy) and &quot;bodega&quot; (cellar), both from Greek apotheke (basement, literally &quot;under-box&quot;)

Do stationary (not moving) and stationery (paper, envelopes and stuff) count?<p>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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.etymonline.com&#x2F;word&#x2F;stationer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.etymonline.com&#x2F;word&#x2F;stationer</a>

My favorite example of similar words with seemingly-unrelated meanings is &quot;capitulate&quot; (surrender) and &quot;recapitulate&quot; (repeat or summarize).<p>Turns out that they both derive from &quot;caput&quot; (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.

I&#x27;d nominate &quot;casual&quot; and &quot;cadaver&quot;.<p>The Latin <i>cadō</i> root had multiple meanings, like &quot;fall&quot;, &quot;die&quot; and &quot;decay&quot;. So while &quot;cadaver&quot; is obvious, &quot;casual&quot; took a circuitous route of &quot;fall&quot; -&gt; &quot;accident&quot; -&gt; &quot;by chance&quot;, and eventually &quot;informal&quot;.

A set that I found interesting:<p>- Defense (protecting something)<p>- Fencing (protecting yourself with a sword)<p>- Fence (a wall that protects your property)<p>- Fence (someone who buys stolen goods which allows the thief to protect themselves from getting caught)

I know I&#x27;m being pedantic here but if you&#x27;re going to insist on writing Greek words with Greek letters you need to stop writing Latin words with the modern &quot;u&quot;.

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&#x27;t know how obvious they are to native English speakers &#x2F; people who didn&#x27;t learn some Latin in school.)<p><pre><code> 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 =&gt; cast aside =&gt; despicable (&quot;abject coward&quot;) =&gt; miserable (&quot;abject poverty&quot;) * conjecture: something thrown together * interject: to throw inbetween * subject: throw under =&gt; something placed underneath something else (&quot;a British subject&quot;, the subject of a sentence, &quot;subject to terms and conditions&quot;, the subject of a paper) * object: thrown against&#x2F;facing =&gt; to expose =&gt; something tangible&#x2F;material * objective: a material object =&gt; not influenced by emotions but based on observed facts vs subjective: subject to emotions&#x2F;personal opinions * objective: thrown against&#x2F;facing =&gt; goal * trajectory: to throw accross * project: to throw forth * adjective: to throw towards =&gt; something added&#x2F;additional =&gt; an adjective * jet: a &quot;throw&quot; =&gt; a jet e.g. of water =&gt; a spout that jets =&gt; jet engine =&gt; a jet (plane with jet engines) =&gt; jet set (lifestyle of people that can travel for pleasure) legere = to choose, to collect&#x2F;gather, to read * elect, elective (optional), elite (&quot;chosen out&quot;), 1337 (= leet, from elite), elegant * select * collect * lecture, college, lector, lectern, lesson * neglect * intellect, intelligent (originally &quot;discerning&quot;, literally &quot;choose between&quot;) * diligent (to choose apart) * legion (a collection of soldiers in the Roman army, now also meaning &quot;numerous&quot;) * legend: &quot;that which must be read&quot; </code></pre> Who would&#x27;ve thought the words 1337, elegant, lesson, and legend are related? Or superjet and adjective?

One of the more interesting ones I&#x27;ve come across lately:<p>France - frank (being unencumbered in speech) - franchise (the right to vote)

Finnish word &quot;Norsu&quot; 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 &quot;Norsu&quot;, which does not seem to be a word in any other language?<p>Well it is explained below. Turns out that Finns had another word &quot;Marsu&quot; for walrus, which also have tusks. So therefore they started using a similar word for a (somewhat) similar animal.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wordsense.eu&#x2F;norsu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wordsense.eu&#x2F;norsu&#x2F;</a>

I really like that definition of &quot;surprising&quot;.<p>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 &quot;not&quot; operation.<p>I am glad this definition took that into account.

Yoga (Sanskrit) and yoke (English).<p>Yoga literally means union and is derived from a prefix yuj meaning to attach, join, harness, yoke.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ZAsNO9eXLgM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ZAsNO9eXLgM</a><p>Explains how &quot;ciao&quot; comes from &quot;servus&quot; via &quot;schiavo&quot;, meaning slave or servant.<p>It&#x27;s also related to words in other languages meaning fame, word, and language.

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.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcasts.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;the-blindboy-podcast&#x2F;id1300577518?i=1000496303922" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcasts.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;the-blindboy-podcast&#x2F;i...</a><p>[1] Library link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worldcat.org&#x2F;title&#x2F;thirty-two-words-for-field-lost-words-of-the-irish-landscape&#x2F;oclc&#x2F;1227875558&amp;referer=brief_results" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worldcat.org&#x2F;title&#x2F;thirty-two-words-for-field-lo...</a>

Fans of this type of thing may enjoy listening to The Allusionist podcast: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theallusionist.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theallusionist.org&#x2F;</a>.

&quot;cannabis&quot; and &quot;hemp&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.illinois.edu&#x2F;view&#x2F;25&#x2F;107526" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.illinois.edu&#x2F;view&#x2F;25&#x2F;107526</a>

A fun example of the opposite – a pair of very similar words that have totally different etymologies – are &quot;carouse&quot; and &quot;carousel&quot;. The former comes via French from German &quot;gar aus&quot;, an exclamation with the same meaning as &quot;drink up&quot; in English (literally, &quot;quite out&quot;). 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?<p>&gt; The leap from a word meaning &quot;imaginary&quot; to a word meaning &quot;fantastic&quot; struck me as odd initially, but apparently it comes from the sense of the word &quot;imaginary&quot; as &quot;unreal&quot;.<p>What other sense is there that Wiktionary doesn’t know about?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;imaginary" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;imaginary</a>

There is a fun triplet in Italian:<p>anello (ring, think annular)<p>anno (year, think annual)<p>ano (anus)<p>all come from the Latin word for ring: the year because of the repetition of seasons and the anus, well, because of its shape.

Related: I&#x27;ve been listening to the History of English podcast. If this kind of content is your thing, it&#x27;s highly recommended.

My personal favourite is “science” and “shit”. Both derive from a root meaning to separate. Science separating one thing from another and…well, you get the idea! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.etymonline.com&#x2F;word&#x2F;shit#etymonline_v_45328" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.etymonline.com&#x2F;word&#x2F;shit#etymonline_v_45328</a>

I can&#x27;t confirm it, but I&#x27;ve studied language and etymology a ton, and I think there is a hidden etymology between &quot;man&quot; (referring to humanity as a whole) and the mama&#x2F;mom&#x2F;mammary cluster. Hear me out.<p>&quot;Ma&quot; is virtually always the first sound a baby makes, and is also reminiscent of breastfeeding, with the lips pursing together. It&#x27;s widely hypothesized that because of this, the word for &quot;mother&quot; in nearly every language on the planet is some variant of &quot;ma(m)&quot;.<p>&quot;Da&quot; and &quot;pa&quot; are the next-easiest sounds to make. Hence, &quot;dada&#x2F;papa&quot; for father (originally pH₂tér in PIE, where h2 is the &quot;a-colored laryngeal).<p>Anyway, we have the word &quot;man&quot;, related to the Latin &quot;homo&quot;, which is suspiciously close to &quot;mama&quot;. Nowadays, &quot;man&quot; (and the Italian &quot;uomo&quot;) has mostly masculine connotation. But it strikes me as really weird how close it is to such a feminine phoneme. My headcannon is that &quot;mam&quot; is the root of words referring to both &quot;mother&quot; (the first human a baby experiences) and &quot;humanity&quot; as a whole.<p>It&#x27;s hard to tease apart the influence of &quot;guma&quot;&#x2F;dhghem, the PIE for earth. Also related to &quot;Adam&quot; (as in &quot;Adam and Eve&quot;) who was famously made from Earth...yes Genesis is essentially based around a giant pun in Hebrew.<p>Mama&#x2F;dada&#x2F;adamah&#x2F;humana - they all swirl around the same phonetic space, and I don&#x27;t think this is a coincidence.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.etymonline.com&#x2F;word&#x2F;*dhghem-?ref=etymonline_crossreference" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.etymonline.com&#x2F;word&#x2F;*dhghem-?ref=etymonline_cros...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Adamah" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Adamah</a>

In the same list as &quot;estate&quot; and &quot;contrast&quot; and &quot;status&quot; we have country names like &quot;Afghanistan&quot;... it is the place where the Afghans are (stand).<p>Also the Spanish&#x2F;Portuguese &quot;estar&quot; (to be).

Etymologies of various profanities and swearwords can be fun to look up. Not so much in English, but it&#x27;s kinda amazing how many Slavic swearwords still have recognizable proto-Indo-European roots in them.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.etymonline.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.etymonline.com&#x2F;</a>

On the flip side, miniature and minimum are etymologically <i>unrelated</i>.

kimono and winter