| ▲ | Why etymologies matter: How tracing words can illuminate history (2024)(resobscura.substack.com) | |||||||||||||
| 40 points by benbreen 4 days ago | 7 comments | ||||||||||||||
| ▲ | satvikpendem 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||
A good book on this is Proto by Laura Spinney, it covers all the branches of Proto-Indo-European and also postulates that the entire family may have started from as few as a hundred speakers who were steppe nomads, which is mindboggling if true. | ||||||||||||||
| ▲ | keiferski 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||
I really love etymology, because I like to imagine words having "lives", and then tracking those lives over the centuries. It's fascinating to think that a word might have begun in China thousands of years ago, migrated to India, then the Islamic World, then Europe, and are now everyday things in English. | ||||||||||||||
| ▲ | mirmor23 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||
many times, even etymology does not make things intuitive: e.g. 'spendthrift'. similarly, many English words are close, but their meaning diverge a lot. e.g. condemn vs condone, or vindicate vs vindictive. | ||||||||||||||
| ▲ | hiccuphippo 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||
And then Hello became Allo in French and Alo in Spanish, which is only used as a greeting over the phone and never as a general greeting. | ||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | adzm 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||
I'm never going to look at a <div> the same | ||||||||||||||