from Indoeuropean "gwen" over scandinavian "kvinna" = Woman

stared 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There is a nice "all women are queen, literally", https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kOY-vXuAiBA

Also, gynecology has the same roots.

shantara 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thank you. I knew “woman” is “kvinder” in Danish, but I never made the connection with the English word for “queen”.

	▲	memsom 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"Queen" came from "The king and his queen". There is no common word for Queen in Germanic languages, and for what ever reason Queen became synonymous with royalty. Originally it just mean "the king and his woman", but I don't know when it changed. Certainly we had more than one word for "adult female human" in old English.

aitchnyu 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Did Japanese get a similar word by coincidence?

	▲	pjc50 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		https://jisho.org/search/queen : which word did you mean? The translator's curse of a language having lots of synonyms, the subtleties of which don't map directly on to English. None of those seem particularly similar to queen/kvinne?

Another cognate is Classical Greek γυνή, whence gynaecology.