Tag: language
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virus
For so many of us, a virus might spell the end of our computer–not our lives, as we are witnessing so tragically in the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Sometimes a viral video is precisely what is needed to distract us from today’s feverish crises. Too often, though, a viral video may be distracting us from them. But…
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tomato, tomatl
If it weren’t for Nahuatl, what would we be eating? As we saw in a recent post on amnesty and coyote, the latter word originates in Nahuatl. Still spoken by about 1.5 million people and a member of the extensive Uto-Aztecan language family native to the Southwest US and Mexico, Nahuatl actually comprises a large variety of dialects. The one…
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court
From Wimbledon to SCOTUS, court has been busy this past week. And while both courts are arguably the most prestigious on their respective, well, courts, the word court is humbler in its origin. Court The English court comes from the Old French, cort, which was naming royal residences by the 12th century. It, in turn, originates in the Latin cohors, contracted to cors.…
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*gno- (part ii)
In Part 1, we studied the origins of the English know–cnaw–rooted in the Proto-Indo-European *gno-, “to know.” As we saw, down the Germanic line, this *gno– eventually parented the English can, could, cunning, couth/uncouth, canny/uncanny, a sense of the word con, and keen. In Greek, it produced gignoskein, with the derivative gnostos. This yielded diagnosis, prognosis, as well as good old gnosis, in all of its mystical and…
Mashed Radish 