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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.

mcswell an hour ago | parent | next [-]

There was a wealthy Italian who was building a villa in the US, and told the architect he wanted a "hollow statue" in it. The architect looked far and wide for a hollow statue, without success. Finally he came back to the client and told him that no one he talked to had heard of hollow statues. The client said, "Oh, it's one of those things that rings, and you pick it up and say "Halo, 'stat you kiddo?"

thadt an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

And likewise became EHLO which could also be used as a greeting over the phone if you were you were talking to an email server.

adzm 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm never going to look at a <div> the same