I’m trying a new experiment today. I call it “etymology boomerang”. We’ll find a link between two current words by taking a detour through past…
[Jorge Diz Pico]
Linguistic articles, mostly about etymology, originally posted in the Tumblr of the same name.
I’m trying a new experiment today. I call it “etymology boomerang”. We’ll find a link between two current words by taking a detour through past…
The word zenith is a mistake. It came to be because Medieval lettering was not exactly optimal. Latin scribes misread the Arabic expression سمت الرأس, samt…
Salt has been a very valued spice for thousands of years, and that has rubbed off on our language. In Roman times, wages were paid…
I smeared over my keys.I lost grip of my keys.My keys fell away. My keys stayed behind.I unminded my keys.I unremembered my keys. Those are…
Spanish curva means “curve”, “turn”, or something bent or crooked. Polish kurwa, pronounced very similar, means “whore”. Erasmus students in either country have a blast…
Carnival is upon us! Such a great display of colors and parades. The most famous is probably that of Venice, and it is actually from…
Héroes del Silencio was, if you ask me, not only the best Spanish band of the 90s, but also one of the greatest rock bands…
Etymology is not semantics. In this blog I talk a lot about etymology, because it’s fun and interesting, and tells us a lot about human…
In Romance languages, the history of the word “to know” is pretty straightforward. Yeah, it comes from Latin. Yawn. Galician/Portuguese conhecer, Spanish conocer, Italian conoscere,…
A small piece of dry ground surrounded by water may be referred to as an island or isle in English. In some neighbouring European languages,…
Year comes from PIE *yer-o- (“year”, “season”), which is probably related to the verbal root *ei- meaning “to make” as in “to make/complete a full cycle”.…
Today’s entry is longer. But to make up for it, it’s really fun. Read these sentences: The old man the boat. When Fred eats food…
When I started learning German, it was funny to see how Lego-like the language was. It made it easy and fun when you could pick…
pornography is a word the French (pornographie) took from the Greek (pornographos), where it meant “depicting prostitutes” (-graphos “write” or “draw”). porno meant “prostitute” after…
In my Facebook, I used to tell little anecdotes from when I travel to a place where they speak a different language or dialect. Now…
This one won’t be about etymology. Let’s diversify our topics! Rather, let’s talk semantics. There’s an often cited mantra in linguistics that every language can…
We use hush, besides for talking about a great Buffy episode, to speak of a silence. It can also be used as an imperative to…
A person that turns into a wolf is a werewolf. It doesn’t take a genius to suspect that were must be some kind of root meaning…
Wow! Here in northern Spain we usually have rain all year around, as well as cloudy gray skies. But this weekend, the heavens were clear…
According to the Rolling Stones, the devil introduces himself as a man of wealth and taste. We use the verb to introduce in a meeting…