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 moreThis 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 morewolf, wolframite, Ralph, Raoul, lycanthrope, lupus
work, wrought, boulevard, energy, argon, allergy, Demiurge, liturgy, metallurgy, surgeon, organic organize
nephology, Niflheim, Nibelungenlied, nebula
original, arboretum, orthodox, run, ride, palfrey, road, ruin
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 more*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 moreJune is for Justice. Justice is Life. ✊🏿✊🏽✊🏼 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
Ayurveda, hygiene, forever, not, age, eternal, medieval, young, June, jury, injury, prejudice, justice
"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 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".
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 moreEurope, Maghreb, Arabia, Erebus
win, wish, Venus, Darwin, vanadium, venom, wonder, winsome
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 moremaroon, measure, meal, moon, month, semester, Medusa, medicine, mode, modern, modest, mold
atrium, arid, Astarte, star, disaster, ash, amaretto, ephemeral
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 moreThis 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 morehall, cellar, lid, color, hell, apocalypse
to cover
to be covering, to be hidingprimary imperfective
to hide, to conceal
to hide, to conceal
to …
Apologies for the sketchy nature. This one exploded on me in several different ways.
female, doe, filial, Tethys, daughter
to produce, to be strong, to be fruitful, to give milk
to milk
pastor, Pan, food, pants, father, pattern
ma: "mother", from Proto-World! Or—more likely—convergent development from onomatopoeia of nursing sounds.
mother, matrix, material, Manchester, mammal
wind, window, nirvana, vent, weather, athlete, fan, atmosphere
stun, tornado, detonate, Thor, thunder, blunderbus
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 moreI'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 moreether, Aidan, edifice, anneal, estivation
brew, broil, breed, ferment, burn, bourbon, 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 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 moreEärendil, Easter, air, soar, east, Austria, Australia, early, Erigeron
hippopotamus, equestrian, zebra