Democracy 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 …
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