@futurebird prompted by your post I just had a look at the German etymology of the word Ameise
What's also interesting about the German word is that a pallet jack is colloquially called 'Ameise' on the shop floor in any company I've worked at, since an older German company made pallet jacks under the name:
What a great list/word study; you can really see the word root connections across idioms.
The Spanish word 'hormiga' also relates to the idea of little bits/bites in that in Spanish 'miga' means 'crumbs.' In some areas of Mexico, the word 'migas' is also used to refer to 'chilaquiles' (a recipe involving old tortillas/tortilla chips, eggs, chiles, and whatever 'crumbs' or bits/bites of leftover foods you have to add).
It's hard to look up the etymology of "ant" because it keeps getting autocorrected to entomology.
All of the European languages have words like "formis" or "myrma" for ants... what happened to English? I thought "It's probably the fault of the Germans" and I was right.
Old English: æmette
Old High German: ameiza
It is related to words that mean "to cut off" or "bite" ... so ants are little things that take bites off of things. Or perhaps little parts of a whole. Little "bits."
English is simply a mishmash-- a jumble of various languages thrown into a container, shaken, stirred and served up in such a way that those of us born into English-speaking households are constantly confused by the "rules", so how can we expect immigrants to master the language?
But we act like it makes sense. Like there is any kind of unifying logic to it. HOW could you say "I throwed the ball" what is WRONG with you? It's obviously "threw" ... Why?
@futurebird That's always a valid question!
Here's weird trivia about the Croatian language. For naming months, all Slavic languages use either Latin-based names (so, similar to English) or Slavic names, based on what's happening in nature and work.
Croatian is one of those that formally use Slavic names, EXCEPT in informal speech - we NEVER call months by their names! We'll always use the ordinal number of the month - e.g. "3rd month" or just short "3rd". 😅
And nobody knows why.
@NotThe@futurebird@purplepadma 😁
What's even funnier - Croatian is the only Slavic language that does that! I'm not sure if it's unique on a global scale, but on the Slavic it definitely is. 😅
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