The English verb 'to wade' is closely related to Romance verbs forms such as Italian 'vado' (I go), French 'va' (goes) and Spanish 'vamos' (we go).
These come from the Latin verb 'vādere' (to go). Most forms of this verb don't survive in the Romance languages, but some of its present tense forms were lent to the mixed bags of the Romance verbs for "to go".
Click the infographic to learn more about the origins of 'to wade' and its Romance cognates.
'Friday' comes from Old English 'Frīġedæġ', literally "day of Frīġ", the Germanic goddess of love.
'Frīġedæġ' stemmed from West Germanic *Frījā dag, a loan translation of Latin 'Veneris diēs' (which became 'venerdì' in Italian, 'vendredi' in French, and 'viernes' in Spanish). The West Germanic peoples equated the Roman goddess Venus with their *Frīju.
'Thursday' comes from Old English 'Þunresdæġ', literally "Thor's day".
While the modern god name 'Thor' was borrowed from Old Norse 'Þórr', the part 'Thurs-' in 'Thursday' directly descends from the genitive case of the Old English counterpart 'Þunor'.
Click the video to listen to how the day name evolved. The Middle English to Early Modern English stages are based on the dialect of the region of London.
@yvanspijk People have obviously already mentioned that laghen is pronounced like "lachen" in German, but what I find funnier is that laugh(e) is pronounced exactly like the German "Lauch" for leek.
@yvanspijk It was interesting as a (British) English speaker to learn that child in Swedish is "barn" because you do immediately make the link to Scots "bairn". There is something a touch Scandinavian about the whole sound of Scots.
'Right' and 'rectum' have a common origin. 'Right' comes from Proto-Germanic *rehtaz (straight; right; just).
This word shared a common Proto-Indo-European ancestor with Latin 'rēctus' (straight; right; just), from which the medical term 'rectum' (straight terminal part of the large intestine) was derived.
In certain dialects of Old English, there were two ways to express 'his' and 'her'.
Beside 'his' and 'hire', there was 'sīn' (pronounced ‘seen’), but this pronoun was reflexive: it could only refer to the subject of the sentence.
My new infographic tells you the whole story.
On my Patreon, everyone – including free members – can read a detailed explanation (1200 words) of this system. If you subscribe to tier 2, you can listen to the reconstructed pronunciation of all historic words.
French 'il est' (he is) comes from Latin 'esse' (to be), whereas il était (he was) comes from 'stāre' (to stand; to stay).
In languages such as Spanish, the descendants of 'esse' and 'stāre' both came to mean "to be", but they remained separate verbs with their own functions: 'ser' is used to describe essences while 'estar' denotes states.
Old French had a counterpart to each of these two verbs - 'estre' vs 'ester' - but they merged before a meaning difference could crystallise.