wolf, 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
Bangalore, Pavuluri Ganitamu, beryl, brilliant
fermentation, thermos, warm, petit four, furnace, gore, frantic, adrenaline
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 moresit, sedate, obsess, possess, president, sediment, chair, cathedral, polyhedron, strontium, banshee, LED, method, period, session, insidious, saddle, seat, nest
*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
win, wish, Venus, Darwin, vanadium, venom, wonder, winsome
atrium, arid, Astarte, star, disaster, ash, amaretto, ephemeral
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 moreengineer, cognate, pregnant, nature, genre, Scheherazade, puny, king, genie, kindergarten
water
water
water
water, rain, sea, lake
water
water, drinkchildish
ether, 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 moreAvon, Punjab, island, Scandinavia, aquarium, sewer, sober
*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, lachrymose, edge, axe, hammer, hear, acoustic, coin, cuneiform, cone
two, neodymium, duet, biceps, bi-, biscuit, duplicate, Maldives, doppelganger, icosahedron, twin, nonbinary
light, Lucifer, Nowruz, berkelium, Waterloo, Roxana, lunatic, lynx
Eärendil, Easter, air, soar, east, Austria, Australia, early, Erigeron