This is a great question btw. ✌️
“Helicopter” isn’t heli - copter
It’s helico - pter.
Helico: Greek for helix or spiral.
Pter: Greek for wing, like a pterodactyl.
Ooooooh great one!
Thanks ☺️! I’m glad you like it! It blew my mind when I first learned it.
Buckaroo comes from the inability to pronounce/ the mispronunciation of the Spanish word for cowboy, Vaquero.
Also hoosegow (juzgado)
Also cool - the Spanish word for jeans is vaquero. So the English word for vaccine and the spanish word for blue jeans are both derived from the Latin word for “cow”. I always thought that was neat.
That is super neat!
Thought of this while looking up where the term “bootleg” comes from. Turns out people used to conceal flasks of alcohol inside the leg of a tall boot to hide them from authorities during Prohibition.
Similar one for the term “shotgun” when you call the front passenger seat. That’s where the guy with the shotgun sat when goods and people were transported by horse-drawn wagons. Also, a funny sidenote: in Finnish language it’s commonly refered to as “pelkääjän paikka” which translates to “seat of the one being afraid”
Yeah “bootleg” is a good one! It just means smuggled, basically.
I think I want to start using “be with you” instead of bye now.
You should seek out the etymology, which has been doing the rounds in the last year or so, of “POG”.
But if you’re not familiar with or interested in online video game streamers and the whole lingo that goes around that world, you might be more interested in something a bit more generic like “channel” which traces all the way back to an ancient Sumerian word for “reed”.
Vadar (Hittite) = Water (in some form all Indoeuropean languages)
That one’s from a common Proto-Indo-European ancestor rather than from a specific known language outside of PIE culture.
I mean, it’s plausible that “water” also comes from one specific language to have ended up in PIE, but it’s further back than we can trace, so we can’t be as certain as we can be for “channel”. There’s also that water is a lot more fundamental to a language than channels, or reeds, are, which makes it less likely to be a borrowing.
On the other hand, PIE did have at least two words for each of water (ancestors of “water” and “aqua”) and fire (“fire” and “igni(s)-”), if not other words. This is somewhat reminiscent of how English ended up with a lot of doubled words after the Normans took over a thousand year ago, so maybe something like that happened back then too.
All I can say is what I was taught a long time ago- I am sure you are righter than I, however my understanding is that the word for water does indeed come from a very ancient common root, possibly originating around the plains of Anatolia.
I however defer to any other input as I lack the academic credentials to assert my claim.
›There’s also that water is a lot more fundamental to a language than channels, or reeds, are, which makes it less likely to be a borrowing.
👆
>“fire” and "igni(s)
I have thought about this one A LOT!
A hassle is a foreign inclusion in a wool top (what is spun into yarn), which is a real hassle to remove.
A skanky fleece is a wool fleece that is matted and infested with maggots.
The terms date back to the 19rh century.
Insulin!
Insulin comes from insula, Latin for “island”.
The area in the pancreas which creates insulin are named the Langerhans Islets.
Hence, insulin!
In “room and board”, board refers to food coverage. The root is “bord” which is old English for table. But this word actually predates English, I believe from proto Germanic as it is also cognate in other Germanic languages. The only reason I learned this is because I’ve been learning Norwegian for several years, where table is “bord”.
Many things leap from the page when you learn a new language. For example, admittedly strange that this never dawned on me, but I simply never even considered that “maybe” is “may” and “be”. That is of course obvious, but it has always just been in my lexicon as the whole word and its meaning. When I realized the Norwegian “kanskje” was literally “kan” and “skje“ or “can happen” my mind was blown.
Oh that’s a great one. Bord is also table in Irish.
I’ve been learning Esperanto, which is basically just all loanwords from different European languages, one thing I’m a little embarrassed to have learned that way is that “Peking” as in Peking Duck, is just a different/older spelling/transliteration of “Beijing” since it’s “Pekino” in Esperanto
Been eating Peking Duck for years, never really stopped to consider where or what Peking was until then.
Vi lernas Esperanton! Kiel vi faris?
Mi komencis per duolingo, sed nun mi plejparte nur legas vikipedio en Esperanto.
Mi instruas min mem jam ĉirkaŭ 3 jarojn, mi ankoraŭ ne estas tute flua, sed mi progresas.
Yeah, there are other recognizable ones from the same postal romanization, like Nanking.
In Dutch we call the city Peking also. Never knew why it was Bejing in English, figured maybe that’s what the Chinese say for it
Old US person here, we used to call it Peking too. I think (haven’t looked it up, but it was what I was told at the time we changed it) it’s a less-accurate version from Westerners who didn’t really listen or asked the wrong person, and Beijing is closer to how the people who live there pronounce it.
Westerners who didn’t really listen or asked the wrong person
Or it was simply the best attempt at the time! Idk if you’ve ever tried to transcribe even your own words phonetically (where you know what sounds you’re enunciating) or tried to guess the spelling (much simpler than phonetics) for a new-to-you word in a foreign language even if you understand the language nearly as well (just don’t have the vocab yet) as a native speaker. It’s really super hard to find letters for sounds!
There’s people whose job is nothing but finding and arguing over the most accurate transcription, e.g. for dictionaries or research, of languages that long have a dictionary, pronunciation guides, learning materials, etc., but are wrong a decent fraction of the time.
Or when they’re not wrong, they’re getting outdated with evolving speech, e.g. “train” has shifted to something like “tchrain” but Merriam Webster claims the transcription is trān while their example pronunciation sounds out [tʒreˑjnə] (loosely: tchraaine) if you listen closely and compare to IPA charts (compare with their entry for “chart”, where they show the ch in the transcription but not the initial t! That looks to me like shart! lol)We might need to give the olden times phoneticians more credit than this 😄. Of course I wasn’t there for it either but I was triggered by what sounds like a dismissive default assumption about people not doing their job properly while in reality we usually all try our best 🙂
Alone -> all one.
Oh shit, that’s a good one!
I’ve always found it fun how in Germanic (and Romance) languages, we still honor the old gods when it comes to the days of the week. Like wednesday being “Wodan’s/Odin’s day” and thursday being “Thor’s day”. I wonder how many devout christians realize this.
I also think the etymology of the German word “Buchstaben” (letter, as in a,b,c) is quite interesting. It literally means “beech rod” and goes back all the way to Germanic tribespeople carving runes into rods made from beechwood.
Freya’s lucky number was 13.
Christian missionaries trying to convert the Norse heathens spread the concept of Friday the 13th being unlucky to turn people from the old ways
Though in German itself, Wodenstag got replaced with Mittwoch (lit. Midweek) over a millennia ago.
The days thing also works for Romance languages.
Lunedì = dì della Luna = Moon day
Martedì = dì di Marte = Mars day
etc.
English names of days are weird. You have the day of the sun and the moon, ok. Fine. Then Tuesday - Friday are norse gods (Tyr, Odin, Thor, Freya), but what’s Saturday doing there?! Saturn is a completely different pantheon!
In Czech we have it simple - Monday is “after Sunday”, then there’s Secondday, Middleday, Fourtday, Fifthday, Sabbath and Not-working-day.
My understanding, though it could be mistaken because I am not a scholar, is that the Germanic peoples were going through and replacing the Roman gods with Norse equivalents. But then they got to Saturn and were like “Hmm, there’s not really a good 1-to-1 match here, so I guess he stays”
That might be fully untrue though. 😅
The Japanese do it cooler. They’ve got sun, moon, and their classical elements. This can be a fun little rabbit hole when trying to understand machine translated business documents
It’s funny how I was learning Brazilian Portuguese and the days of the week are like Sábado (Saturday), Domingo (Sunday), but then everything starts becoming “days of the fair”, segunda-feira, terça-feira, quarta-feira, quinta-feira, sexta-feira…
And I, an English speaker, have the gall to still find this confusing when it comes to intuitively using non-weekends.
Like “BuT wHiCh DaY iS tHoR’s DaY?!” Asks the Californian who’s never been a Norseman to their knowledge 😂
The Norse called Saturday “Laugerdagr” which translates to washing day/laundry day. They apparently thought doing the wash was equal to worship of their gods. Which, I don’t totally disagree. (Cleanliness is next to godliness)
The church wasn’t having that though… So they went with the roman God of time. Saturn.
Same I’m Swedish, “bokstav”. Beech staff. Funny enough, bok also means book. Maybe the etymology for book comes from that. Or vice versa.
I’m pretty sure book comes from the French world bouc, which refers to goat skin, which was used to make books in the Middle Ages
Interesting. Maybe it’s still related somehow if two different things were used to make the same item they somehow were named the same thing.
Interesting! I thought it came from “book” somehow, but that doesn’t really hold up when I think about it.
Well it does! “Book” comes from the Germanic word for “Beech”, because we used beech to write on. Just like in the prior example.
Wait what? Buchstaben = Buchenstab? Never knew that one.
Admiral comes from Arabic “amīral”. “Amir” means king, prince, chief, leader, and “al” is the definite article, in English “the” (compare algebra or alchemy).
So admiral means “leader of the”, the Arabic for “leader of the sea”, Amīr al-Baḥr, was too long to survive the whole game of telephone.
apropos algebra, that comes from al-Jabr, which (approximately) means reunion, resetting of broken parts, or balancing, and is a shortnening of the title of the book (copy-pasted from wiktionary) al-kitāb al-muḵtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wa-l-muqābala, “The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing”. the author of this book, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi also gave us the word “algorithm” (from al-Khwarizmi)
Most of the words starting with ‘al’ in Spanish come from Arabic. I think the weirdest one is ‘ojala’ (I hope) which comes from “Inshallah”.
In Latin sinister means left (as in the direction), but later it also meant evil or unlucky. That led to the Old French senestre and sinistre, meaning false or unfavorable. Then finally the English sinister meaning malicious.
The etymology for left (especially in reference to handedness) in multiple languages is actually pretty discriminatory.
Since I’m a left-handed Native American with tan skin and I’m 6’1", I like telling people that I am a tall, dark, and sinister man.
I bet you’re really a muffin!
I learned a while ago that the opposite of ambidextrous is ambisinister. The “left” origin of the word sinister gives a bit more context, as if describing someone who had two left hands!
I’ve heard “a diestra y siniestra” in Spanish which means left and right but it’s Latin and left in Spanish is actually izquierda which doesn’t have clear etymology. Most popular theory is that it comes from Basque language and somehow substituted ‘siniestra’ at some point but it’s contested. It’s mostly agreed it comes from some language that predated Romans and Latin, probably from Pyrenees but no one knows which language that was for sure.
I know isquierda is left in Portuguese too!
This isn’t a common term but it’s something I recently learned that’s kind of funny - the country Timor-Leste is named from the Malay word timur, meaning “east”, and the Portuguese word leste, meaning “east”. So it’s literally “East East”.
That’s bizarre …… during the independence violence the news always refers to it as East Timor, so it would have been more literally east east
How is one language more literal than another?
Apothecary
Ancient Greek for “storage shed”.
makes sense
Barbecue comes from Spanish barbacoa which comes from Taino language used in the Caribbean region. Natives there invented barbecue, the Spanish took it to the old continent and it spread from there.
Chocolate comes from náhuatl language used by Mexica people. Xocoatl, from xoco ‘sour’ y atl ‘water’.
Coach (as in bus) comes from Hungarian kocsi. They invented a type of horse pulled carriage which later gave the name to the coaches we know from westerns and then to busses and cars. Coche (car in Spanish) has the same etymology.
Are they also related to german Kutsche = horse carriage?
No idea but it definitely sounds like it.
Yes. I enjoy browsing Wiktionary and finding relations between words.
“Great” used to mean “big” rather than “really good”. Which is why the largest of the islands in the North Atlantic archipelago is called “Great Britain”.
This penny dropped for me when I heard someone from GB/IR use something like “that’s grand!” rather than great. That painted quite a literal picture in my head at the time!
“Great-grandmother” is another example where the great=big meaning still shows up…
