Aotearoa, the Māori name for New Zealand is fairly well known these days, and often translated as "Land of the Long White Cloud". But it's not quite that simple. even beyond that it used to refer only to the North Island.
"long white cloud" is an appealing translation, because …
read moreIn the coming week, it will be September 9th, 9-9! And this particular September 9th would also be my grandfather's 99th birthday. The corresponding Word Family also came out this week.
As different as they may look, French quatre-vingt and Welsh phedwar ugain are exact cognates …
read moreIn the coming week, it will be September 9th, 9-9! And this particular September 9th would also be my grandfather's 99th birthday.
There is also a chart of Indo-European "99"s over in the Data Visualization section.
It's been speculated that Proto-Indo-European <*h₁néwn̥>»1: "nine" could come from Proto-Indo-European …
read moreI made a map a couple of years back of this family when I went to see the Hōkūleʻa. Then recently I was working on an upcoming family for another Austronesian root that I want to link to this one, it was time to make it a full family …
read moreBy Patreon request! This year, N7 day is a Friday, so we've got Shepard. I'm Word Family Friday, and this is my favorite Indo-European root on the Citadel.
This root appears in many forms in Germanic and Balto-Slavic, but has only marginal/uncertain presence outside those two branches.
(Family …
read moreIn each Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic the word for "thousand" is derived from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰéslo-—apparently "handful"?—but in different forms.
Greek χίλιοι khílioi (kilo-) seems to derive from *ǵʰesliyoy, possibly a plural adjective form?
In Indo-Iranian it's prefixed with *sem- as *sm̥-ǵʰéslom, which could be translated as …
read moreProto-Indo-European *h₂endʰ-: "to bloom" is represented almost entirely by Greek ἄνθος ánthos, but there's just enough smattering across other branches to demonstrate that it's not something the Greeks picked up after they split from the rest of IE.
anthology, chrysanthemum, Ianthe
barrel, metaphor, Veronica, amphora, offer, Lucifer, ferret, wheelbarrow, tidal bore, birthday
Proto-Indo-European *pótis: "head of household, master, husband"—which I have a tendency to anglicize as a homophone of POTUS—is the origin of words like "despot", "non compos mentis", and "nepotism".
Poseidon, power, possible, possible, hospitality, possess, nephew, nepotism, Neptune
Latin Mercury is fairly mysterious. Mercury as a god of commerce seems obviously related to merx: "merchandise, commodity", and in Faliscan and possibly Oscan votive tablets, a cognate to merx (or rather its dative mercii as expected in context) appears as a divine name: Mercui, Mirikui. But in Latin …
read moreOne neat discovery in this family is that English has words from three different compoundings of *h₃ekʷ- with *h₂énti: "opposite, near, in front" three different times: compounded in Proto-Indo-European *h₂énti-h₃kʷós goes through Latin antiquus to give antique and antic; compounded again in Late Latin as *anteocularis it goes through …
read moreI met a baby Elowen last week. After initially wondering if it was another example of -wen, I found that it was actually the singulative suffix -en on Cornish elow: "elms"—the equivalent of Welsh llwyfen: "elm", llwyf: "elms".
*h₁elmos: "wych elm (Ulmus glabra)" shows up with identical meaning …
read moreA quick Austronesian word family inspired by my friend Kai's birthday: Malayo-Polynesian *tasik: "sea, coastal water, saltwater, tide" -> Hawaiʻian kai: "sea, saltwater, coast, tide".
The Oceanic compound *taqu-tasi: "expert sailor" (lit. "sea-able, sea-knowing") is such a cool word, I included Austronesian *tsaqu: "to know how, to be able", too …
read moreI was very excited to realize tawus and peacock were related!
Étienne de Silhouette, a French politician of Basque ancestry, was the Controller-General of Finances under Louis XV in 1759. His measures to curb the national debt, notably by imposing new taxes on the rich and the nobility prompted a backlash and ultimately his dismissal after less than a year …
read moreThere are two words from Sumerian whose descendants are still used all over the world today: gi: "reed"—what they wrote with—and dub: "tablet"—what they wrote on.
Just in case you wonder how important Sumerian writing was in world history.
The word tablet (Latin tabula) is probably …
read moreProto-Indo-European *h₂ew: "away from, since, again" cannot be formally tied to *h₂epó: "off, away", but the similarity is suggestive. Perhaps Pre-Proto-Indo-European *b became either *p (by fortition) or *w (by lenition) in almost all cases, accounting for the paucity of *b in PIE.
In any case, the later (re …
read morecook, cook, coach, quiche, cake, kitchen, culinary, abrecock, Pepsi-Cola, biscuit, Budapest
Dr. Melenaite Taumoefolau makes a compelling and intriguing argument: that Nuclear Polynesian *sawaiki: "traditional/mythological homeland"—whence Hawaii—may be a cognate of *sau ʔariki borrowed from the Tongic branch into Nuclear Polynesian. (Note that *sawaiki can only be reconstructed to NP, it is not present in Tongic or …
read moreDragon tears.
The etymology of dragon (Classical Greek δράκων drákōn) is not certain, but is traditionally linked to δέρκομαι dérkomai: "to see, to watch".
"Derkomai…really?" Not so odd: The aorist active participle (m.) of δέρκομαι dérkomai is δρακών drakṓn—the only difference from δράκων drákōn is the placement …
read moreterahertz, Britain, Sanskrit, Paris, Jakarta
The Mystery of the Penny.
I've got three families, each a possible origin for West Germanic *panning: "penny", possible borrowings from either Latin patina: "pan" (via variants *patna, *panna), Latin pannus: "cloth, or—less realistically—Punic 𐤐𐤍 pene: "face".
I prefer the explanation that the first pennies were small …
read moreThe attempt to brand cis(gender) as a slur is not truly about the word itself—they wouldn't be any happier with any other word that was used for the same meaning—but an attempt to deny the very category of "cisgender" and thus by extension the existence of …
read moreThere are two west Asian wander words for musical instruments: *pandVr- and tabVr-. *pandVr- mostly means a stringed instrument, and tabVr- mostly means a kind of drum, but that is not consistent.
The *p-d and *t-b could possibly be metathesis of place of articulation, while leaving voicing in place …
read morehalogen, coleslaw, salad, sauce, salary, salt
I've included (possibly) two families again in this one, Proto-Indo-European *wet-: "year, year-old" and Proto-Indo-European *wósr̥: "spring (season)". There's no formal connection, but it's not hard to imagine on either the phonetic or the semantic level.
Acrostatic *ó-r̥ nouns like *wósr̥ are from very early PIE. You could imagine …
read moreThe particle *me meaning "with, at, between" is probably the origin of *médʰyos: "middle"—in turn the origin of many, many words.
I wonder if *meh₁-: "to measure" and *meh₁d-: "to consider, to give advice, to heal" isn't also from *me. Germanic *midlą for example sometimes means "middle" but …
read moreIn which the US states of Mississippi, Michigan, and Massachusetts all have a common ancestor in Algonquian *meʔši-: "large".
But not Missouri. I checked 4 or 5 times because my mind kept rejecting the answer.
Michigan, Mississippi, Massachusetts
albino, auburn, daub, oaf, elf, Alfred, Oberon, Elbe, Arpad, Alps
It's the Twelfth Day of Christmas, also called Epiphany or Three Kings Day!
In the European tradition, the Three Kings are named Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar.
"Melchior" is apparently Hebrew מלכיאור melek-i-ʾór: "King of Light". Or possibly an Akkadian or Aramaic name king of something else …
read moreHimalaya(s), chimera, hibernate, Zima
This word for "moon" is wide spread through Afro-Asiatic and specifically Semitic languages. The one exception is Arabic which uses قمر qamar for moon, instead of the expected *war(i)ḵ. The origin of qamar is unsolved.
Though Arabic may have borrowed the word tārīk: "date, time, time-keeping" from …
read moreIn which linguistics should probably be *dinguistics.
Armenian լեզու lezu, Lithuanian liežùvis, and Latin lingua (all "tongue") are modified from their expected reflexes of *dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s by association with *leyǵʰ-: "to lick". The expected words would be Armenian *tezu, Lithuanian *iežùvis, and Latin dingua (attested in Old Latin).
Though …
read moreIt'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, work, energy, George, liturgy, surgeon, organic
Bangalore, 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 …
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 sea turtles" and …
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 …
read morearctic, Ursa Major, Arthur, Miranda, smile
I'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/, /t …
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 be irregular, and the semantic …
read morenephology, Niflheim, Nibelungenlied, nebula
Love, compassion, and pity to Tonga and the city of Nuku'alofa.
There is disagreement whether Oceanic word: "to be fond of, to feel empathy for" is properly reconstructed as with an *l, making it a likely derivative of Austronesian *qalǝp: "to beckon, to wave", or with an *r, and …
read moreMLK 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
Peculiar fellow, that cyclops.
fee, feudal, peculiar, fellow, cyclops, 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 more"What are the basic events of a conventional katabasis adventure? Come. Circumvent. Get a souvenir."
sit, sedate, obsess, possess, president, sediment, chair, cathedral, 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 is …
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 to imagine that …
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. ✊🏿✊🏽✊🏼 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
Ayurveda, hygiene, forever, not, age, eternal, medieval, young, June, jury, injury, prejudice, justice
economy, vicinity, village, New York, sandwich
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 more*kʷetwer- is too long for a root. The feminine root suggests that there may have been an original root of just *kʷet-. There are also several reasons to believe that none of this is the original word for four:
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 more"Warlock" originally meant "oathbreaker", a compound of *wērō: "truth, oath" and *lugô: "liar". Here I have the families for both pieces of the compound.
There also used to be a related word in Old English þēodloga, which I am quite fond of. It would have been thedelock in English …
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 moreOne day, 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? Germanic *paþaz is apparently a borrowing from …
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, to coagulate …
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 possible *woḱéh₂: "(female) cow".
And some other likely descendants of (the same?) Central Asian substrate words for "cattle": Sino-Tibetan *ŋwa: "cattle, ox", West Semitic *baḳar-: "cattle, ox"
cow, butter, botany, beef, vaccine
I 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 …
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 Old Chinese lɯw: "oil, grease", which is plausibly from the Tocharian equivalent of Slavic *lȏjь, and …
read moreI'm in the process of expanding this family, after merging the original Proto-Indo-European *bʰleh₃-: "flower" with Proto-Indo-European *bʰelǵʰ-: "to swell" (originally under title word a href="/word-family-budget.html"Budget/a)—and putting both under Proto-Indo-European *bʰel-: "to blow, to swell up".
In which dryad and druid are basically the same word, trust and tryst, trees and truce. Plus horse racing history.
tree, true, true, endure, druid, dryad, larch, derby, tray, 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 morestegosaur, tile, thatch, thatch, deck, deck, toga, detective, thug
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 morebleach, blank, black, blue, beluga, flame, Baltic, pool
This is 98th Word Family in 98 weeks. As I close in on 100, I'm doing two families inspired by comments on the very first family. In this case, the comment "I found recently that the words bison and weasel come from the same …
read moreTying Minoan (Cretan) Phaistos and Greek Hephaestus in to this family is speculative, but not as wild a reach as it first looks like.
Hephaestus and Phaistos, Crete:
We usually represent the name as Hephaestus in the Roman alphabet, after Roman transliteration traditions, but (as …
read moreNext week, the sister of Phoenix.
Greek, Charles, corn, grain, grenade
edema, Oedipus, oat, atter, attercop
win, wish, Venus, Darwin, vanadium, venom, wonder, winsome
spin, spider, span, poise, peso, ponder
Bonus word family for Halloween by special request from my 4 year old: witch from *weyk-: "to separate, to choose, to consecrate".
*weyk- looks like an extended root implying *wey-, but I can't find any clear evidence for that root. If it is an extension of *wey-, a zero-grade …
read moreGot out of hand, never managed to finish, as yet.
curve, search, circle, cross, ring, cyborg, clavicle, close
maroon, measure, meal, moon, month, semester, Medusa, medicine, mode, modern, modest, mold
atrium, arid, Astarte, star, disaster, ash, amaretto, ephemeral
sleep, avalanche, avalanche, lip, lobe, lick, lichen
naga, naked, gym, night, nocturnal
Latin words munio: "fortifiation" (English munitions) and murus: "wall" (English mural) appear to come from a *mey- root, so could be related, but are more likely connected to *mewtʰi- which gives various words about "pole, stick, post, picket"
municipal, common, communicate, Mithra, migrate, mix, miscellaneous …
read moreThe 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, filbert
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 moreThis page describes a counter-factual in which the Tengwar writing system (from Tolkien's Middle-Earth) is instead developed by speakers of Polynesian languages and called Tuʻara.
I developed it primarily for use in my D&D game. I …
read moreelse, eldritch, alias, alien, ultimate, outrage, other
android, Andromeda, Alexander, Nero, Andrew
For the end of my architecture theme month, I've put together a collection a few small-but-interesting families with architecture words that I did preliminary research on, before concluding each was too small to a weekly family on its own.
column, excel, hill, Celsius, Stockholm, Sherlock Holmes
hall, cellar, eyelid, color, hell, apocalypse
door, hors d'oeuvre, foreign, forest, 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 influence early Iron Age Celtic. The rest of the month will focus on words that were borrowed from Gaulish into Latin (more things like the aside in today's families that the very iconic Latin word gladius being borrowed from Gaulish …
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, 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, "a clother (in wool)".
In 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 …
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, vent, weather, athlete, fan, atmosphere
stun, tornado, detonate, Thor, thunder, blunderbus
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, cognate, pregnant, nature, genre, Scheherazade, puny, king, genie, kindergarten
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 to societal …
read moreguide, vision, envy, prudent, Hades, idyllic, 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 these two …
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 to Germanic *t …
read moreinnocent, noxious, necromancer, nectar
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
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
ether, Aidan, edifice, anneal, estivation
brew, broil, breed, ferment, burn, bourbon whiskey, broth, bread
*péh₂wr̥ means "fire" as an inanimate substance (grammatically neuter), as opposed to *h₁n̥gʷnis, which is animate, elemental fire (grammatically animate in earlier PIE, masculine in later PIE).
*péh₂wr̥ is though to contain the (é)-wr̥ suffix that derives nouns from roots, though there are no …
read moreProto-Indo-European had (at least) two words *h₁n̥gʷnis: "fire" (grammatically animate) and *péh₂wr̥ (grammatically inanimate).
Effectively all descendants of *h₁engʷ- have lost the labialization, so distinguishing it from reconstructed **h₁eng- is not immediately obivous. It mostly survives only in languages that merge *g and *gʷ (Balto-Slavic …
read moreAvon, Punjab, island, Scandinavia, aquarium, sewer, sober
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 piece in chess and the Welsh word for the knight piece in chess might be …
read more*wed-: "water" and some potentially related other roots
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".
wash, otter, hydra, vodka, whiskey …
read moreSemtic *ʾartɬʼ-: "earth" and Proto-Indo-European *h₁erTeH: "earth". I connect these for several reasons (beyond the obvious). First, there are several indicators that *h₁ was pronounced as a glottal stop, including a number of other words that are apparent correspondences between PIE *h₁ and Semitic …
read morechthonic, algorithm, humus, Demeter, Gaea, George, geometry, chameleon, camomile, humility, Daoine Sidhe, human
*ḱer(h₁)-: "to grow, to make grow, to increase" is mostly in the western IE languages; *ḱer-: "to braid, to weave, rope" is mostly in the east, with only Greek and Armenian having both forms. I would suspect the western *ḱerh₁-: "to make grow" form is a derived root …
read moreoxygen, acid, eager, vinegar, tear, edge, ax, hammer, hear, acoustic, coin, cuneiform, cone
be, physician, kit and (ca)boodle, hobbit, prove, tribe,
For 2017-07-07, I just had to do "seven".
It may seems strange to see the word for "seven" borrowed around between so many different language families, when the numbers 1-10 are so highly conserved in descendants of (post-Anatolian) Proto-Indo-European. But 10-based number systems seem to not …
read moreIt is the right and proper state of a people or nation to be free, generous, honorable, hairy, libertine, and liberal children and vegetables.
liberty, deliver, Loðbrok, Luther
Celtic *windos: "white, bright", which may be a zero-grade nasal infix of *weyd-: "to see", and thus "visible, bright".
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, attrition, thresh, tour, turn, tournament, thread, detergent
A small family, apparently from *dʰeh₂bʰ-: "fit together, fitting, make".
Germanic *(ge)dabaną: "to fit, to be fitting" and Balto-Slavic forms like Lithuanian dabinti: "to decorate, to beautify" and Slavic *dobrъ: "good" are almost certainly related to each other. Likewise Latin faber: "craftsman, maker, smith" and …
read moreclay, glue, cloth, cloud, child
subtle, text, technology, dachshund, city, haunt, position
light, Lucifer, Nowruz, berkelium, Waterloo, Roxana, lunatic, lynx
The root *h₂ews-: "sunrise" may be connected to *h₂ew-: "away from, since, again" and *h₂ewg-: "to increase, to enlarge", compare for example *h₂éwgeh₂: "sunrise, dawn" (literally, "the increase") from *h₂ewg-.
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
This is a tricky one—another of these mysterious wanderwords coming out of the steppe. My current best hypothesis, based on the distribution in time and space, is that the Scythians/Northern Iranians picked it up somewhere and spread it around.
Another theory connects …
read moreIn which car and horse turn out to be the same word: "thing that runs". As are corsair and hussar.
course, corsair, current, curriculum, excursion, parkour, car, charge, walrus, horse, epicurean, corral, rush
hippopotamus, equestrian, zebra, alfalfa, Azores
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"Capernaum" is a poem by Lewis Spence (1874-1955), 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, and it’s a …
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