Tag: Fun Etymology

Running a bit late today, ladies and gents! We’re blaming the fact that our little writing-mouse has managed to catch a cold and was, to be quite honest, napping.

Anyway, it’s Tuesday, isn’t it? You know what that means, it’s time for another Fun Etymology! Today’s word is “morning”!

“Morning” actually consists of two elements. Can you think of what they might be?

Well, one of them is the suffix -ing. So the other must be simple “morn”. You might not recognise that as an actual word nowadays but it used to be! Or a contraction of one anyway: the Middle English word “morwen” from the Old English, Mercian dialect to be specific, dative case of “margen” (dative “morgne”), meaning morning, forenoon or sunrise.

This Old English word comes from Proto-Germanic *murgana, meaning simply “morning”, from PIE *merk-, possibly from the root *mer-, meaning, interestingly enough, “to blink” or “twinkle”.

The Proto-Germanic form, it turns out, got around quite a bit and we thus find Old Saxon “morgan”, Old Frisian “morgen”, Dutch “morgen”, German “morgen”, Swedish “morgon”, and so on. Remember what forms that share an origin are called? Cognates, right? Then you might be interested to know that, looking at the PIE form, we may find yet another cognate to English “morning”: the Lithuanian word mirgėti, meaning “to blink”! Didn’t expect that? Well, like we’ve said before, words may change their meaning significantly and words that appear unrelated may sometimes show us that they have a distant relative or two.

Welcome back next week!

Ah, Tuesday. Wonderful, amazing Tuesday.

Why is it wonderful? Well, it sure isn’t because of the Scandinavian weather, but because it’s time for another fun Etymology!!

Speaking of time, we’ve been working a bit of a theme here and today is no different! Today’s word is “hour”.

Originally meaning “divine office prescribed for each of the seven canonical hours; the daily service at the canonical hours”, the word comes to English from Old French “ore”, meaning “one-twelfth of a day”, from Latin “hora”, meaning “an hour” or, a bit more poetically “time of year, season”. The Latin word itself comes from Greek hōra, which was used to indicate any limited time within a year, month, or day, and comes from PIE *yor-a-, from the root *yer-, meaning, of course, year.

Now, that’s some trip! But, you might remember that we promised you a treat last week? “Minute”, we said, is very similar in many Germanic languages, yet “hour”, we teased, is not.

And that’s indeed true. In the Scandinavian languages, the word for hour is “ti(m)me”, from Old Norse “timi”, which you could properly guess would simply be “time” in English.

That was the easy one: in German, the word for “hour” is “stunde”. Can you find an English equivalent? Maybe not? Well, there is one: stound! This word comes from Proto-Germanic *stundō, meaning “point in time, hour” from PIE *stā, meaning “to stand”. Aside from English, this word is found in the Scandinavian languages as “stund”, meaning “a short while, a short period of time”.

So, while there are different words for “hour” in the Germanic languages, it is often the case that we find parallel words with a somewhat altered meaning in the other Germanic languages. These words are cognates, meaning simply that they share an origin, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they mean the same thing today. Do you know of any interesting cognates that you want to share with us? Please do and let us all learn a bit more, and welcome back next week for more Fun Etymology!

Friends!

Today is Tuesday! Again! Gosh, where does the time go?! Speaking of, in today’s Fun Etymology Tuesday, we’ll continue to look a bit closer at time – particularly, we’ll trace the time measurement ‘minute’ throughout.. well, time.

So, ‘minute’ means the sixtieth part of an hour and it came to English from Old French ‘minut’ or directly from Latin ‘minuta’, meaning minute or short note, during the late 14th century. The Medieval Latin form, in turn, comes from Latin minuta, an inflected version of minutus, meaning little or small, which hails from the PIE root *mei-, meaning small.

Oh, if you remember last week, we had the secunda pars minuta? Well, the minute is the minuta prima, meaning ‘first small part’, a term first used by a mathematician to describe one-sixtieth of a circle.

What’s interesting to note among these time measurement is the close similarity in many PIE-languages: minute (English), minut (Swedish), minuut (Dutch), minute (French), minuto (Italian), minat (Hindi), minút (Frisian)… you get the drift?

Next week, though, we’ll introduce you to yet another concept of time, one which is significantly different in some of the Germanic languages.. Tune in then and listen (read) to the tale of the hour (or should we say ‘timme’ or ‘Stunde’?)!

See you next week!

We’re sneaking this in at the last second, but it’s Tuesday—time for Fun Etymology!

Speaking of, for our second etymology of the year, our word is: ‘second.’

You can play second fiddle, be someone’s second in a duel, or second the motion. All these connotations stem from the sequential idea that the second is the one after the first. Our modern meaning tightly marries ‘second’ to the number 2, but the Latin root ‘secundus’ more broadly means “following, next in time or order”, itself coming from PIE *sekw-, “to follow”.

So why do we say there are 60 seconds in a minute? We borrowed this meaning from Old French ‘seconde’, which comes from Medieval Latin ‘secunda’, a shortened version of ‘secunda pars minuta’ meaning roughly “second diminished part”. (‘Secunda’ here is, of course, just a form of ‘secundus’.) Here’s the logic: the first time you divide an hour by sixty, you get minutes (the ‘prime minute’, the first little part). The second time you divide an hour by sixty, you get seconds (the second little part).

Can you believe this is our second Fun Etymology of 2019? Can you believe this is our second year at the HLC?! Those diminutive parts of an hour sure fly by, don’t they?

Ladies and gents!

Welcome to 2019 and the very first Fun Etymology of the year!

Speaking of the new year, this year is the last -teen-year of the century (nineTEEN, that is)! In honour of that, today’s word is more of a word-forming element: you guessed it, it’s -teen!

This word-forming element marks cardinal numbers from 13 to 19 and means “ten more than”, so “ten more than 9” = 19.
It comes to us from Anglian Old English -tēne, West Saxon -tiene, which developed from an inflected form of Proto-Germanic *tehun, meaning “ten”. The Proto-Germanic word comes from Proto-Indo-European *déḱm̥t. In this element, we can see a real sound change happening: the English element -teen is cognate with Italian -dici, from Latin -decim. Notice that the PIE word which they come from starts with a <d> and so does the derived word in Latin and Italian? But in English, it starts with a <t>! Isn’t that just a beautiful example of Grimm’s Law?

Welcome to the year two thousand and nineteen, friends, and to another year of language fun!

Friends! A merry Christmas to you all! Aside from being Christmas Day, today is also…. Fun Etymology Tuesday!! You did get a taste yesterday with the Scandinavian word ‘Jul’ and today, we’ll continue on that line of words: today’s word is ‘Christmas’ itself!

Christmas is actually a shortened version of ‘Christ’s mass’ and the first time it pops up in English is in 1038, as ‘Crīstemæsse’. Of course, the word itself can basically be split in two: Crist- and -mæsse. Crist- refers to Christianity’s Jesus Christ, but the word itself comes from Greek Khrīstos, which is a translation from Hebrew Māšîah (Messiah) meaning “anointed”.
The second part of our word for today,
-mæsse, comes from Latin ‘missa’, which refers to the rite of Holy Communion in the Christian faith.

But did you know that, before “Christmas” became the popular word on the block, Anglo-Saxons also used the word “Nātiuiteð” from Latin nātīvitās, meaning “birth”. The modern English word is “nativity”. So, if Christmas hadn’t stuck around, you might have been walking about, telling your (non-pregnant) neighbour to have a great nativity!

But, of course, that didn’t happen, and so, the HLC wishes every one of our readers a very merry Xmas! (Did you know: the abbreviation has actually been around since Middle English, during which we find ‘Χρ̄es masse’ where the Χρ̄ is short for Greek Χριστός, ‘Khrīstos’?)

Merry Christmas, dear friends, from all of us here at the HLC!

God jul, dear friends!

We know, we know, it’s only Monday, but, this week, we have a special etymology for you: Today’s word is “Jul”!
‘Jul’ is the Scandinavian word for, you guessed it, Yule (though, technically, it functions more like ‘Christmas’). The word comes to us from Old Norse jól, meaning ‘midwinter season’, which comes from Proto-Germanic *jehwlą, meaning ‘festivity’, which comes to us from PIE *jekə- meaning ‘joke, play’. The English equivalent, Yule, comes from Old English ġeōl, also meaning ‘midwinter season’, which may either share the same root as jul or simply be borrowed from those savage Vikings plaguing the land (we’re not really sure)

But, it’s not Tuesday, so why etymology today, right? Well, today, at least two of us here at the HLC celebrate Christmas, or jul! You see, in the Scandinavian countries, you celebrate on Christmas Eve, not on Christmas day! Why? Supposedly, people here used to consider the day ended when the sun set (and let us assure you, it does that really early here in Scandinavia in December), so they thought that what we now think of as Christmas Eve to be Christmas Day!

So, in true (Swedish) fashion:
Från oss alla, till er alla: en riktigt god jul!
(From all of us, to all of you: have a very merry Christmas!)

Hello, my dear followers! It’s Tuesday, and, as usual, it’s time for another word history to come your way!

Today’s word is “kitchen”.

Where I come from, in the Mediterranean, the kitchen is a temple. It’s one of the most sacred spaces in the house. It’s where food is prepared and brought to the table.
The source of all deliciousness.
Every Italian person has fond memories of their grandmothers lovingly crafting some masterpiece in that holiest of sanctums.

The word “kitchen” and its sibling “cook” are a splendid example of two related words which have diverged so much in sound that it’s hard to tell they’re cognates.
“Kitchen” comes from Old English “cycene”, itself from Proto-Germanic *kokina. This word was probably a very early loanword directly from Latin, as the first Germanic tribes were nomadic and did not have kitchens. In Latin, it is “coquina”, coming from “coquus”, the etymology of the English word “cook”!
They all come from the PIE root *pekw-, ‘to cook, to prepare’.

Hello, sweet followers!
It’s Tuesday, and it’s time to bring you another interesting tidbit of word history!

Today’s word is “checkmate”.

Chess is the prototype of the “smart” game. When we think of a very intellectual, scheming person we more often than not picture them as playing chess in their spare time.
There’s good reason for this: this game, which originated in India around 250 AD, is easy to learn, but difficult to master. It requires deep thinking and a keen eye for opportunity, and it’s one of the most complex games we play (though not the most complex: that honour probably belongs to Go, invented in China before the 6th century BC. It is so complex, the number of possible board positions has been estimated at 10 to the 107th power. That’s 1000000000000000000000000000 times the number of atoms in the known universe! Chew on that a bit).
From India, the game made its way along the caravan routes to Persia, from where it reached us.
Everybody knows the word that signals victory in a chess match: “checkmate”. It’s become almost synonymous with intellectual victory: you’ve seen it pronounced by detectives and supervillains alike in many movies and books.
But it is a peculiar word, isn’t it? Why “check”? And why “mate”? Are you inviting your friends to take a look at the sick winning move you just pulled?
Well, no. The word comes to us from Old French “eschec mat”, which itself comes from the Persian phrase “shah mat”, meaning “the king is dead”, the ultimate winning condition in chess.

Next time you outsmart your archnemesis, regale them with this tidbit of etymological trivia for extra smugness points!

Hello, my language friends! It’s Tuesday again and this means, you guessed it, another fun etymology!

Today’s word is “moon”.

Ah, the Moon. If the Sun is the originator of all life and movement on Earth, the Moon is certainly the great timekeeper. Various animal species use its light to time their reproductive cycles, and, since time immemorial, humans have used its convenient phase cycle to determine where they were in time. It’s also the closest astronomical body to Earth, and our greatest companion. Countless poems have been written of its beauty, and its pockmarked face is a constant friend in the sky: Europeans saw a man looking down at them in the patterns of craters and dry lava seas; the Chinese a bunny zealously working on the elixir of immortality.

From its use as time measurer, the Moon gets its name: it comes from Old English “mona”, from Proto-Germanic “*monan”, itself from Proto-Indo-European “*menses-“, which means “a measure of time”, and is the same root that gave us our word “month”. The ultimate root is PIE *me-, ‘to measure’, which arrived to English also as the word “meter”, through Ancient Greek.