@yvanspijk@toot.community
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yvanspijk

@yvanspijk@toot.community

DJO-in ['ʤowɪn]

Historisch taalkundige, dialectoloog, leraar NT2, redacteur, auteur bij Onze Taal

Historical linguist, dialectologist, Dutch teacher, editor, writer

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yvanspijk, to random
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'Foreign' is etymologically related to 'door'.

'Foreign' stems from Popular Latin *forānus (outsider), a derivation of Latin 'forīs' (outside).

It got its silent G because people believed it had something to do with 'reign'.

Latin 'forīs' is a cousin of 'door'. Here's more:

yvanspijk, to random
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French 'voir', Italian 'vedere', and Spanish 'ver' (to see) are related to German 'wissen', Swedish 'vet', and Dutch 'weten' (to know).

Their common root was a word meaning "to see". Its perfect tense took on a resultative meaning: "I have seen" became "I know".

Here's more:

yvanspijk, to random
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'Former' was formed by combining Middle English 'forme' ("first") and '-er', so at the time it literally meant "firster".

'Foremost' is peculiar too: it used to be 'formest' - 'forme' plus '-est', so literally "firstest" - but the part '-mest' was replaced by unrelated 'most'.

Here's more:

yvanspijk, to random
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On Sunday I made a graphic about 'thing'. Its Proto-Germanic ancestor *þingan meant "folk assembly".

If *þingan didn't meant "thing" yet, what was the word for that?

It was *wehtiz, a word that became 'wight' and is also part of 'naughty' and 'not'.

Here's a graphic from 2023:

yvanspijk, to random
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The Proto-Germanic ancestor of 'thing' and its cognates 'ding', 'ting' etc. meant "folk assembly".

The Latin ancestor of French 'chose', Spanish and Italian 'cosa' etc. meant "legal case".

Both words underwent a series of meaning shifts that resulted in the meanings "matter; thing".

Here's how:

yvanspijk,
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@jonny Proto-Germanic had the word discussed in the post below, while Latin had 'res', as in 'rēs pūblica' (the public matter/thing), which became 'republic' in English.

https://toot.community/@yvanspijk/111970792138749232

yvanspijk,
@yvanspijk@toot.community avatar

@jonny Thank you very much! In fact, what I do and love doing is communicating what scholars who have a much bigger track record than me researched. They wrote dictionaries of Old English, Middle English, Old High German and all the other Germanic languages, they wrote etymological dictionaries of all words in these languages, and made reconstructions of the language these descended from. These dictionaries show how the meanings of the words changed over the centuries, so ... 1/

yvanspijk,
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@jonny 2/ ... what I do is put this information together and show the development.
As for your second question, the phases of English shown in the graphic roughly correspond to these periods:

  • Old English 7th c. - 11th c.
  • Middle English 11th c. - 15th c.
    (- Early Modern English 15th c. - 17th c.)
    The other 'Old' and 'Middle' phases are close to these periods as well.
yvanspijk, to random
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The words 'year', 'hour' and 'horoscope' all derive from the same root.

'Year' was inherited from a Proto-Germanic word that came from the same Proto-Indo-European root as Ancient Greek 'hōrā' (year; time; hour).

Via Latin and Old French, 'hōrā' became 'hour'.

Here's the whole story:

yvanspijk, to random
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On Sunday I made an infographic about early Latin loanwords related to construction, such as 'kitchen' and 'street'.

Here's one about food.

Unlike words such as 'carnivore' and 'edible' - late, obvious loanwords - words such as 'cheese' and 'wine' were borrowed from Latin 2000-1500 years ago.

yvanspijk, to random
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Words such as 'formula' and 'ratio' instantly give away their Latin origin, but did you know 'wall' and 'kitchen' come from Latin too?

They were borrowed during the Roman occupation of a part of Europe that spoke the ancestor of English.

This infographic shows six of these early borrowings into West Germanic and their descendants in English, Dutch, and German:

yvanspijk, to random
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The word 'island' and the names 'Jersey', 'Scandinavia', and 'Batavia' all contain a descendant of the same Proto-Germanic word:
*awjō: "land in or close to a body of water".

This infographic - which I had a lot of fun designing - shows how these words (and others) are related:

yvanspijk, to random
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So far in 2024, I've been told in the most friendly ways that the Indo-European languages stem from Albanian, from Greek, from Kurdish, from Sanskrit and from Ukrainian.

A new day, a new nationalist. 🙄

yvanspijk, to random
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The word 'language' stems from the same root as 'tongue'.

'Language' comes from an Old French derivation of Latin 'lingua' (tongue), which was 'dinguā' in Old Latin.

'Dinguā' was a distant cousin of the Proto-Germanic ancestor of 'tongue'.

See the graphic for more information:

yvanspijk, to random
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The French word 'trop' means "too (much)", as in 'trop grand' (too big) or 'il mange trop' (he eats too much).

It was borrowed from Proto-West Germanic *þrop (crowd; cluster; village), a variant of *þorp, which became German 'Dorf', Dutch 'dorp' and archaic English 'thorp', all "village".

Here's more:

yvanspijk, to random
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The French adverb 'très' means "very", as in 'très grand' (very big).

It comes from the Latin preposition 'trāns' (beyond; across).

What happened in French was different from Spanish, where 'trāns' remained a preposition, 'tras' (after; behind; beyond), and Portuguese, where it became 'trás' (behind).

Here's more:

yvanspijk, to random
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Homophones are words that are pronounced the same as another word but differ in meaning.

If they are spelled differently as well, they're also heterographs.

yvanspijk, to random
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Omdat ik erg blij ben met wat vormgeefster Yolanda Huntelaar weer van onze rubriek gemaakt heeft en ik graag reclame maak voor het blad Onze Taal, hierbij de aflevering van 'Taal aan de wandel' in het net uitgekomen januari-februari-nummer:

yvanspijk, to random
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French 'chez', as in 'chez nous' (at our place; with us), has the same origin as the word 'casa' (house) in languages such as Spanish and Italian.

In Old French it meant "at the house of". After centuries of widening, its array of meanings has now become very broad.

Here's more:

yvanspijk, to random
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The word 'clean' has the same ancestor as German and Dutch 'klein' (small; little).

The meaning of this common Proto-Germanic ancestor is reconstructed as "shining".

In the Germanic daughter languages, this meaning shifted following different paths.

Click the graphic for more:

yvanspijk, to random
@yvanspijk@toot.community avatar

Why is 1/60 of a minute called a 'second', just like the ordinal number that goes with 'two'?

It's because a second is the second subdivision of an hour, a minute being the first.

The word 'minute' in turn simply comes from the Latin word for "small (part)".

Here's the entire story:

yvanspijk,
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@turbobob Here are the main references:

  • Philippa et al. (2003-2009). Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands, Amsterdam.
  • Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1983–1991). Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, Madrid
  • ATILF (1971-now). Trésor de la language française informatisé.
    The rest of the works used are simple non-etymological dictionaries in which I looked up some of the daughter words.
yvanspijk, to random
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The Romance words for "self" and "same", such as French 'même', Spanish 'mismo', and Portuguese 'mesmo', don't come from the Classical Latin words for "self" and "same".

Instead, they stem from Popular Latin *metipsimus: "the very same", or literally "self-selfest".

The infographic shows how it went:

yvanspijk, to random
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Making one infographic takes me 2 to 4 hours. My work will always be free because I want to make people excited about linguistics and spread knowledge.

However, if you'd like to support my work I would be thrilled if you subscribed to my Patreon for $2 a month.

patreon.com/yvanspijk

Some perks:

yvanspijk, to random
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Spanish 'de donde' means "from where".

1000 years ago, in Old Spanish, this would've meant "from from from where".

Old Spanish had 'onde' (from where), but it ended up in a cycle where it was twice reinforced by 'de' (from):
onde > donde > de donde.

Click the infographic to read how this happened:

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