thing for words – In high school, I made the people carpooling with me bring in words to discuss during each morning ride, and in college, I plastered “word of the day” posters all over campus. Now, I want to share my favorite part about words: their deep origins and vast connections.
over time and branch into new languages. Linguists classify these languages into families, and then identify a root or proto language for each family. There are 94 language families in the world, and over 6900 currently spoken languages.
the Indo-European family, the most spoken family in the world. A language is like a distinct species, but instead of the ability to interbreed, you have the ability to understand everyone else speaking that language. So why do I have a hard time understanding my British relatives? That’s cuz of something called dialects.
the language, but can differ in pronunciation, vocabulary, or grammar. The Southern US and Aussie dialects evolved from the English dialect more recently than our California dialect, so they all say 'fisha' while we say 'fisher.' Besides regional dialects, there are also social dialects– like ebonics, or one you all know, leet speak.
some linguists think that every language in the world evolved from just one. They look for words in diverse languages that have similar meanings and spellings, like “maliq” for breast/suck/neck/swallow. But it’s nearly impossible to prove they’re related, because meanings and morphology change so much over time.
the same parent language, and we may argue endlessly over what constitutes a dialect of English, but either way, the fact remains that the languages in the world have all influenced each other in big ways, and I’m going to show you how.
in the obvious way – a child language inherits words from its parents, usually modifying them slightly over time. For example - the English “word” comes from the proto-Germanic “wurdan” which comes from the proto-indo-european root “were”, meaning to speak or say. inheritance
called borrowing. Languages often borrow words from another language during an invasion or colonization, and typically they borrow words for a particular type of thing – like the names of the invading country’s animals. These borrowed words are called loan words.
café bougette musique A word is composed of its meaning and spelling, and when it is borrowed into a language as a loan word, those aspects may stay the same or diverge. Examples: The french word café has remained the same, musique changed to music, and bougette changed from meaning “small leather purse” to our modern meaning of budget.
languages, it chases them down back alleys and then goes through their pockets for spare metaphors.” – George Bernard Shaw English is particularly well known for borrowing words, with about 75% of our words coming from other languages – though mostly in the same indo european family. You could almost think of English as a language that is Germanic in syntax but Romantic in vocabulary. Let’s look at some of the ways that English borrows.
The English “verb” came from Old French verbe, from Latin verbum, and ultimately from the same proto-indo-european root as “word”. So, word and verb are in fact, cognates – words that share a common root. One was borrowed, the other was inherited. “verb”
same language have the same root but entered from different routes, linguists call them doublets or etymological twins. It usually happens when a language borrows from another at 2 different points in its history, and happened often in English with words with Latin roots. Some examples are chief and chef, and host and guest.
our family. English gets the word “tea” from the Dutch traders in China, who heard one pronunciation. Another 40 languages of the world use “cha” from Portuguese traders who heard the other pronunciation. “cha” later entered English from Indian “chai”, and now all you Starbucks-lovers know it.
the best place for growing fruits, a lot of our fruit names come from other languages, like the notoriously unrhymable word “orange”. Orange trees first grew in China, then the word started in India, traveled over 6 languages, and eventually landed in our laps.
a word. When Dutch people heard Malays referring to the “orangutans” , they assumed they meant the funny looking orange haired apes – when actually they meant the native tribesman. But now we will always refer to the apes as orangutans – meaning “man of the wild woods” – which actually fits pretty well.
a word is taken from a language and never given back – so really loanword is a misnomer. But, sometimes a language takes it back after it’s changed a bit. The english took beef from French, combined it with steak to mean a cut of beef, and then French and Spanish liked that and took it back as bistec.
we understand the origin of a word, we can suddenly understand the origins of many other words, and gain a new perspective on their meaning. Thats what makes all of this so exciting for me. For example, “mirror” comes from the French word for reflecting glass, which comes from the Latin verb mirari to wonder at, and the Latin root mirus meaning wonderful.
miracle miraculum (obj. of wonder) mirage Miranda merveille mirabilia (wonderful things) admire “mirus” relatives Latin French English admirer Mirabelle That latin root “mirus” inspired many a derivative in its own language and others. English gained the words miracle, marvel, admire, and mirage through Latin or through a sidestep in French, as well as the girl’s names Miranda and Mirabelle. So, now you can use etymology as an excuse for baby-making tonight. *wink
if we go back even farther to the Proto-Indo-european root for “mirus”, we find that it produced the Germanic word “smila” and then, our “smile”. So the next time you smile at a miracle while admiring yourself in a mirror.. well, you can thank all your indo-european parents and invaders.
about word meanings, there are a lot of places to look. You can subscribe to podcasts or RSS feeds for words of the day, or whenever you’re curious – look up a word in the dictionary, and trace its roots back as far as possible. You never know what wondrous marvels you’ll find.
pamelafox
matleenalaakso
hachama
pnuslide
mchowning
nnydtmg
signer
tetsuyaooooo
irocho
martine
codingcamp2025
phodgson
eileencodes
sstephenson
rmw
bermonpainter
destraynor
chriscoyier
tammyeverts
maggiecrowley
smashingmag
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orderedlist
