It's UN International Literacy Day!
This timeline shows a very compressed history of writing, organized into major groups of scripts.
While many writing systems have been invented over the millennia, very few of them were ever created completely from scratch by people who …
read morewolf, wolframite, Ralph, Raoul, lycanthrope, lupus
now, Naples, supernova, novel, announce, novice, Nobel Prize, new, innovate
work, wrought, boulevard, energy, argon, allergy, Demiurge, liturgy, metallurgy, surgeon, organic organize
Pavuluri Ganitamu, beryl, brilliant
Both Classical Sanskrit 𑀫𑀭𑀓𑀢 marakata: "emerald" and Classical Greek μᾰ́ραγδος máragdos: "emerald" appear to be borrowed from a source like *maraktV.
This is presumably a form closely related to the Phoenician brqt and Hebrew baréket: "emerald", from *b-r-ḳ: "shining, sparkling". Akkadian cognate baraqu: "shine" instead might have had an equivalent -t …
read moreShirts, stickers, etc. are available on RedBubble
They won't give me enough character count to fully explain on RedBubble, so the full explanation here:
LGBTQ:
The American Indigenous languages from the US and Canada are mostly extinct, dying, or spoken by relatively tiny remaining communities. It is easy to assume the same about Central and South America, and to think of some of the well-known historical peoples—like "Incas", "Aztecs …
read morefermentation, thermos, warm, petit four, furnace, gore, frantic, adrenaline
One final "turtle" word: "honu"
It is very tempting to unify *pəñu: "sea turtle" with *pəNuʔ: "to fill, full, container". And *pəNuʔ: "full" has potential cognates in the possible Sino-Austronesian macrofamily/Southeast Asian historic sprachbund.
And then at that point you're speculating a link between "green …
read moreTurtledoves are not named after turtles, in fact "turtle" has meant the bird for longer than it meant the reptile.
In Middle English tortu meant "turtle" (from Latin tortuca) and turtel mean "turtledove" (from Latin turtur), then they collapsed into "turtle". The modern meaning of "turtle" won out, and …
read moreA whole pile of words for things with shells and exoskeletons built on something like *kar-
Some of these are probably each of
In which we go from Latin ūrō: "I burn" to English bust: "upper torso", with very little semantic or phonological similarity.
Latin ūrō: "I burn" picks up an extra b- in many inflected forms based on re-analysis of amb-ūrō, leading to Latin bustum: "place for fires".
Then semantically Latin …
read moreA Mediterranean/Caucasian substrate word approximately like *wion: "violet (flower)", was borrowed into Hellenic, Iranian, and Italic.
Greek Ionia is probably not related, since the Mycenaean shows 𐀂𐀊𐀺𐀚 i-ja-wo-ne for "Ionians" with digamma in a different position than the *wion expected for "violet" , and Egyptian 𓇌𓅱𓈖𓏭𓉻𓂝𓏛 ywnj-ꜥꜣ supports that.
But it's …
read moreHere I'm following Blažek's compelling argument (2017) to derive *h₂ŕ̥Tk̑os from *h₂r̥dh₂éḱh₃-s: "bee-eater", similar to many later words for bear that mean things like "honey eater", "honey pig", "thief of bees", "bee bear", "bee wolf", … . This instead of the traditional connection …
read moreI've been doing Word Families for 5 years! In that time, I have made 150 families! So this week is *pénkʷe: "five".
The *p-kʷ sequence in *pénkʷe leads to a set highly divergent forms. *kʷ is a highly variable sound on its own, becoming /kw/, /w/, /ʍ/, /k …
read moreIn which yes- and -day in yesterday are the same root.
"The day that’s the other day"
Germanic *dagaz is often explained as being from *dʰegʷʰ-: "to burn", but the loss of labialization would …
read morenephology, Niflheim, Nibelungenlied, nebula
Love, compassion, and pity to Tonga and the city of Nuku'alofa.
MLK is King
(Martin Luther King Jr. Day Holiday Bonus)
Godiva, gift, gable, cephalopod, exhibit, habeas corpus, able, ability, habitat, gaffer tape, javelin
The PIE word *yóh₁r̥: "year" becomes both the native English "year" and also the Latinate "hour". Fascinatingly, Greek ὥρᾱ hṓrā (whence the Latin) is also borrowed, post-Alexander, into Classical Sanskrit along with the Hellenistic-Babylonian astronomy/astrology, eventually giving such descendants as Thai โหร hǒon: "astrologer, prophet, magician"!
original, arboretum, orthodox, run, ride, palfrey, road, ruin
fee, feudal, cyclops, peculiar, fight, Shadowfax
I've been thinking about herons and egrets a lot recently. For the past year or so, our morning walk goes by a half mile of drainage ditch with an amazing variety of water birds. We regularly see 4 different species of heron: great blue heron, great egret, snowy egret …
read moreCome on a katabasis adventure! Get a souvenir!
come, adventure, convenient, event, inventor, souvenir, base, katabasis
sit, sedate, obsess, possess, president, sediment, polyhedron, strontium, banshee, LED, method, period, session, insidious, saddle, seat, nest
ruby, roan, red, rowan, russet, robust, corroborate, julep, rose
Rob Roy, Rufus, Eritrea, Rousseau, Russell, Paso Robles, Rosetta Stone
I had a lot of fun playing Supergiant Games's Hades recently, so I put together a run down of word family information for the names in the game, organized according to the in-game Codex! (Minus the Fables section, which is more spoiler-y and generally less etymologically interesting.)
This will …
read moreThe short, simple English word not is a contraction of an Old English phrase "not ever a thing".
ne: "not"
ā: "ever"
wiht: "creature, person, thing"
(Or really, a West Germanic contraction, it also gives German nicht and Dutch niet).
Equivalent to Germanic *ne-aiwa-wihtã or Proto-Indo-European *ne-h₂óyu-wektom.
Similarly, never …
read moreDemocracy is Hard.
Hippocratic Oath, democracy, hard, Richard
The period of unseasonably hot weather after an initial autumn cooling—now often called "Indian summer"—was previously called "goose summer" in English because it corresponds with the beginning of goose hunting season. Compare Irish fómhar beag na ngéanna: "warm period in Autumn (Indian summer)", literally "little autumn of …
read moreWhile *linom: "flax" and *līnom: "flax" obviously must be connected in some way, the difference in vowel length cannot be reconciled by any regular changes.
All versions with the long vowel are plausibly attributable to derivation from Latin līnum. All the short vowel versions could theoretically be from Greek …
read moreBeirut in my thoughts today.
Beirut, "memory", "epicenter"
*ḱel-: "to lean", which gives us *ḱlew-: "to hear". The connection is most explicit in *h₂eus-ḱl̥teh₂ye-ti, literally: "leans an ear", which gives Latin auscultō: "I listen, I hear, I heed, I obey".
There is also *ḱel- and *ḱley- meaning "to shelter, to cover". It's easy …
read moreThe colors white, gold, yellow, yellow-green, green, sky blue, and navy blue in various languages. And the chemical elements chlorine, gold and arsenic in English.
chlorine, yellow, cholera, Glasgow, lapis lazuli, gold, yield, guild, arsenic
For the UN Interntaional Day of the Seafarer (June 25)
naiad, astronaut, nausea, navy, navigate
Proper Freedom for our Friends this Friday (Juneteenth). ✊🏿✊🏽✊🏼
And perhaps more importantly, proper freedom even for those who are not our friends. Which is in contrast to the ancient, but all too modern, semantic connection where only those we like get to be free.
freedom, proper, friend, Friday …
read moreJune is for Justice. Justice is Life. ✊🏿✊🏽✊🏼 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
forever, not, age, young, rejuvenate, June, injury, justice
vicinity, village, New York, sandwich, economy
This is quite a large family with a number of borrowings into other language families. Because, it turns out, the Indo-European speakers' relationship with wheels is pretty important in a lot of people's history, like the Sumerians' relationship with reeds.
There is also a root *wel(h₁)-: "to turn …
read moreNote: I haven't written in the definitions for words meaning "four", "four-", or "forty" if they're in the respective section.
four, tesseract, square, squadron, quarter, Tetris, quarantine
Demon Pandemic Zeitgeist Time
democracy, pandemic, zeitgeist, time, demon
Celtic, Greek, and Latin each have words for "island" that involve /n/ and /s/ and cannot be completely explained. One possibility is that they are all borrowings from the same non-Indo-European source.
Even if those three are all connected, it would still be beyond credibility for Malayo-Polynesian *nusa …
read moreI'm working on a series of "sorceror", "magician", "wizard", etc. But I had to move up warlock: "oathbreaker, truth-liar". It is the confluence of two families: "truth" and "lies".
very, verify, Varangian, warlock,
It has long been noted that the Ancient Greek λέων léon: "lion" (whence the word for lion in nearly all Balto-Slavic, Germanic, and Italic languages, as well as a few others) looks almost like it comes from Semitic *labu, but not quite. Pre-Classical Greek would be expect …
read moreAll English meanings of "check" derive from the chess term:
checklist, checkup, checks and balances, checkers, checking account, checkered past, …
All of them.
check, chess, checkers, shah, Xerxes
There's a very cool fact: cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, kohlrabi, and others are all the species of plant, namely Brassica oleracea, selectively bred for different parts of the plant. (https://www.google.com/search?q=brassica+oleracea+selection)
Only recently did I realized that many …
read moreFind the Path
A few weeks ago, I picked up my phone to look up the etymology of "Pontic", but got distracted and looked up the etymology of "path" first. And it turned out they were the same! But wait, how does that work, cause Grimm's Law?
*paþaz is …
read moreIndo-European seems to have had two words for "blood" *krewh₂-: "spilled blood, blood outside the body" (with extended meanings of bloodshed and cruelty) contrasts to *h₁ésh₂r̥: "flowing blood, living blood" (with extended meanings of family).
The root *krews- is probably a derived root, and means "to harden …
read more(Tegurala introduction: I have a D&D setting I have developed, which I call Tegurala. When I started working on it, I decided to use real world languages for the fantasy languages, for naming language consistency without having to create a bunch of new ConLangs. Giants use Uralic languages)
Proto-Indo-European has *gʷṓws: "cow, cattle" and *woḱéh₂: "(female) cow". The expected feminine of the *gʷṓws would be something like **gʷow(s)éh₂. *woḱéh₂ looks similar, but not quite there.
Sino-Tibetan *ŋwa: "cattle, ox" is also highly reminiscent of *gʷṓws …
read moreI present two families for "pig" here, partly because Armenian խոզ xoz is derivable from either family (see footnote [1])
Family 1, Indo-European *suH- pig, sow?", possibly related to Akkadian 𒊺𒄷𒌑 še-hu-u₂ and Sumerian 𒋚 šah; and family 2, Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰóryos: "pig", probably central PIE dialect (Greek …
read moreI get a little speculative here, if not downright provocative. There are words for dog all over Eurasia that recall each other. These could be onomatopoeic, but they do not much resemble the common forms you find in words that actually used as dog sound …
read moreIn which "olive oil" is redundant.
The Greek and Armenian words are often interpreted as being from a Mediterranean substrate word. But then there's the Slavic *lȏjь: "tallow, suet". And then the Old Chinese lɯw: "oil, grease", which is plausibly from the Tocharian equivalent of …
read morebloom, flower, flourish, belladonna, blade, chlorophyll
In which "dryad" and "druid" are basically the same word, "trust" and "tryst", "trees" and "truce". Plus horse racing history.
true, endure, tree, derby, larch, druid, dryad, tray
root, orchard, radio, radish, eradicate
Pterodactyl. Two cool realizations about Greek "pter-". 1) "Helicopter" is so strongly segmented as "heli-copter" in English, it's fun to realize that the Greek construction is actually "helico-pter": "twisting (helix) wing". 2) More recently I realized it's an awesome example of Grimm's Law: apply …
read moreAnkylosaurus! And as an unexpected bonus, I found Azhdarchid pterosaurs deep in the family, too. Pterosaurs are probably my very favorite Mesozoic animals (stay tuned for next week!). Also in this family: various spiders and snakes and fears and sins in various languages.
I … read moresteganography, detect, Stegosaurus, thug, thatch, deck
horn, unicorn, cheer, migraine, carrot, Triceratops
This is the 100th Word Family Friday in 100 weeks, and the last before I take a break for a few weeks to work on infrastructure and pad my buffer. I originally had a different idea, but then I realized I of course had …
read moreEurope, Maghreb, Arabia, Erebus
Next week, the sister of Phoenix.
Greek, Charles, corn, grain, grenade
edema, Oedipus, oat, atter, attercop
win, wish, Venus, vanadium, venom, wonder, winsome
spin, spider, span, poise, peso, ponder
Bonus word family for Halloween by special request from my 4 year old: "witch".
Got out of hand, never managed to finish, as yet.
curve, search, circle, cross, ring, cyborg, clavicle, close
measure, meal, moon, month, medicine, modest, modem
to hang loosely, to be weak, lip, to lick
to fall down? to relax?primary verb
to sleep
to sleep
to sleep
naga, naked, gym, night, nocturnal
municipal, common, communicate, Mithra, mix, mutant, miss
to exchange, to intermingle
service, duty, obligation, public office
citizen (duty-taker)
township, town
town council, town hall, government office
The Celtic word *dūnom: "hill fort" was borrowed into Germanic twice, once as "hill" and once as "fort".
The first time was borrowed before the completion of Grimm's Law, so Grimm's Law changed the *d to *t for Germanic *tūną: "enclosure", which eventually gave English "town …
read morecomplete, supply, full, poly-, folk
to fill
in-fill (perfective)
to fill
This word for "guest"/"host" is restricted to the Late Northwest Indo-European languages, appearing—as far as I know—only in Balto-Slavic, Germanic, and Italic, plus a single personal name in Lepontic (Celtic). It seems to be cognate to a word for "to eat" which is …
read more
"My language is my awakening, my language is the window to my soul."
This page describes a counter-factual in which the Tengwar writing system (from Tolkien's Middle-Earth) is instead a native writing system developed by Polynesian speakers, called Tuʻara.
I developed it primarily for use …
read moreelse, eldritch, alias, alien, ultimate, outrage, other
I was preparing a family this week that I thought included the English word wall. But as I researched it, I found that Germanic *waigaz: "wall" connects to that family, but English "wall" is from the unrelated Germanic *wallą from Latin vallum: "wall, rampart".
I took the opportunity to …
read moreto rise, to be tall
to rise
I elevate, I raise up, I rise, I exult, I excel
to excel
hall, cellar, lid, color, hell, apocalypse
to cover
to be covering, to be hidingprimary imperfective
to hide, to conceal
to hide, to conceal
door, hors d'oeuvre, foreign, forum, Dvorak
In my undergraduate Early Medieval Europe class at university, one of the assignments was a fictional source document. I wrote a piece of a fictional Visigothic epic about the Battle of Adrianople that had been preserved in a Spanish monastery.
This fragment of the Frithugairns at …
read moreApologies for the sketchy nature. This one exploded on me in several different ways.
June's theme is linguistic effects of the Celtic Hegemony of the early Iron Age. The rest of the month will focus on words that were borrowed from Gaulish into Latin (things like very iconic Latin word gladius being borrowed from Gaulish, which appears in …
read morefemale, doe, filial, Tethys, daughter
to produce, to be strong, to be fruitful, to give milk
to milk
pastor, Pan, food, pants, father, pattern
mother, matrix, material, Manchester, mammal
Donald Duck dives to the deep abyss of Dover in a Bathysphere! (What a dope.)
The Healy-Price extended family tree, with consanguine, affine, and fictive family.
Spoiler warning: major and minor spoilers from throughout the InCryptid books and short stories.
Version 2: Updated through Tricks for Free.
Proto-Indo-European *h₂éwis: "bird" and Proto-Indo-European *h₂ówis: "sheep" appear to be umlaut variants, presumably through the more sparsely attested root *h₂ew-: "to put on clothes, to cover". *h₂éwis: "bird" would be from a passive participle, "a clothed (in feathers)". *h₂ówis: "sheep" from an active participle …
read moreIn English, constituent question words are often called wh-words: what, when, where, which, why, whether. All these are spelled with a w and pronounced with a w (the h is pronounced in some dialects and not others). This is not coincidence.
The primary interrogative particle in Proto-Indo-European is *k …
read moremulch, marmalade, Melissa, mead, amethyst, methane
I made a timeline in Timeline JS from knight lab. But I haven't managed to integrate it with the new website. It can be accessed here through the knight lab CDN
read moreSummary: While the alliance of US states to particular parties fluctuates, regional voting blocks are much more persistent. The primary regional voting blocks are Union North vs. Confederate South and Urban East vs. Rural West.
Principal …
read morewind, window, nirvana, vent, weather, athlete, fan, atmosphere
Thor, thunder, astonish, tornado, detonate, Tarquinia
Germanic really went to town with this root, creating a bunch of morphological forms that aren't attested in any other branches, and in a few cases I can't even relate them to any standard derivational forms I know in either PIE or Proto-Germanic.
engineer, nature, genre, Scheherazade, king
lord, ward, guard, warn, garnish, garage, revere, wary, Arthur
isthmus, sudden, transition, count, Mahayana, January
This is the family that no matter how long I work on it, it's never done. That's what I get for trying to explore the possibility that two extremely important and productive roots may be connected: *h₂er-, related to cosmic order, and *h₃reǵ-, related …
read moreguide, vision, Hades, idol, Rigveda, idea, history, wise
This root has been reconstructed as *ǵʰew-, *ǵʰewH-, *gewH, *gʷewH, *gʷewh₂, with different combinations of the definitions I've listed, but:
*bʰewdʰ- vs. *gʷʰedʰ-: two families that end up being super confusing in Germanic languages, since *bʰ and *gʷʰ merge at the beginning of a word. In English, they end up being homophones with complementary/opposite meanings: "offer" vs. "ask for".
I had to do …
read moreWe start religion words with *dyḗwos ph₂tḗr, Old Father Shining-Sky himself.
Interestingly English "day" is not from this root, despite similarity to many IE words for day, e.g. Latin diēs, etc. Germanic d corresponds to Latin f (PIE dʰ); Latin d corresponds …
read moreinnocent, noxious, necromancer, nectar
to perish, to disappear
perishes, disappearsimperfective
to be lost, to perish, to disappear, to be gone
A root meaning "to run, to depart" can be reconstructed from Hellenic and Indo-Iranian. But in Northwest branches, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, and possibly Italic, there is a phonologically identical root meaning "to die". So it's probably a euphemism coined in a Late Northwest Indo-European …
read morequick, biology, vitamin, zoology, hygiene
water
water
water
water, rain, sea, lake
water
water, drinkchildish
Tulips and lilies from Egyptian
I'm not seriously proposing that words for "death" all across the Northern Hemisphere are related, but I'm not entirely not proposing that, or at least that there may be an ancient wander-word (possibly driven by taboo replacement?) that made its way across much Eurasia …
read moreSumerians and reeds were very influential! (Cuneiform was written with a sharpened reed stylus and was the first writing system, possibly tied with Egyptian hieroglyphs.)
I love that "canon" and "cannon" are related.
cane, cannon, channel, canister, canon
heat, fire
heat, be warm
warm
sweat
sweat
sweat
warm
to be warm, be hot
ether, Aidan, edifice, anneal, estivation
brew, broil, breed, ferment, burn, bourbon, broth, bread
fire, bonfire
fire, torch, campfire, fever
remains of a fire, ashes, cinders
couch grass
couch grass …
fireanimate, elemental fire as opposed to <*péh₂wr̥>: fire as an inanimate/contained substance
fire
fire, light, weapons fire
Avon, Punjab, island, Scandinavia, aquarium, sewer, sober
I love how Indo-European *udrós, "aquatic", became the word for "otter" in 4 out of the 5 branches where it is attested, except for Greek where it became "sea serpent".
vodka, whiskey, water, hydrogen, otter, hydra, wash
Here we have three possibly tied groups: Afro-Asiatic *ʔariĉ̣-: "earth" (e.g. eretz), Indo-European *h₁er-: "earth" (e.g. earth) and Indo-European "to plow" (e.g. arable)
There are several indicators that *h₁ was pronounced as a glottal stop, including a number of other …
read morechthonic, algorithm, humus, Demeter, Gaea, George, geometry, chameleon, camomile, humility, Daoine Sidhe, human
creole, create, crescent, kore, cereal
oxygen, vinegar, tear, edge, axe, hammer, hear, acoustic, coin, cuneiform
be, physician, kit and (ca)boodle, hobbit, prove, tribe,
This week begins a very loose July "theme" of a handful of miscellaneous everyday words, before we move into some strongly themed months for most of the rest of the year.
For 2017-07-07, I just had to do "seven".
All words mean "seven" unless otherwise specified.
It is the right and proper state of a people or nation to be free, generous, honorable, hairy, libertine, and liberal children and vegetables.
Ragnar Lothbrok, deliver, liberty, Luther
Fiona, Jennifer, Guinevere, penguin, Vienna, wiener
avatar, trans-, tradition, nectar, thorough
torque, torch, queer, intricate
two, neodymium, duet, biceps, bi-, biscuit, duplicate, Maldives, doppelganger, icosahedron, twin, nonbinary
throw, dreidel, tribade, thresh, thread
fit together, fitting, make
to decorate, to beautify
to fit, to be fitting
to happen, to be appropriate
clay, glue, cloth, cloud, child
subtle, text, technology, dachshund, city, haunt, position
light, Lucifer, Nowruz, Waterloo, Roxana, lunar, lynx
Eärendil, Easter, air, soar, east, Austria, Australia, early
Two final, small "horse" families.
Update: I have re-made the "ride"/"palfrey" family on a separate page. It is not small.
and
On St. Patrick's Day, I reveal the secret reason I did horses in March.
Also, this one is really cool and just might go back all the way to the original domestication of horses in Central Asia. Maybe—just maybe—the Thai word for the knight …
read moreIn which horse and car are the same word.
course, car, charge, walrus, horse, rush
hippopotamus, equestrian, zebra
mirror, admire, miracle, Miranda, smile
ElfQuest is comic series that has been being published since 1978. It is considered a landmark in independent comic publishing, and has had a dedicated fan base for 40 years. ElfQuest has also had a deep influence on me, in many channels. I'm not going to try to explain …
read more(Transferred from my old WordPress)
Capernaum is a poem by Lewis Spence, which was set to music by Ed Miller and appears on his album, Border Background (1989). Miller’s arrangement is also the title song on the Tannahill Weaver’s album, Capernaum (1994).
I own both of those albums …
read more