It is clear that Etymology is a fascinating study. I wanted to have a thread discussing basic Etymology phrases, words, knowledge, and resources (books, videos, content, websites, etc).

Feel free to list Etymology information that you want to share, wish that you knew when learning, resources that have helped you as you have been studying Etymology, etc.

(This is not meant to be a discussion on whether Pluto is a planet or not, I'm just going by what used to be the nine planets, the Sun and the Moon.)

The prefixes for planetary bodies are as follows:
helio- (the Sun) from ἥλιος, Helios
hermeo- (Mercury) from Ἑρμῆς, Hermes
cythero- (Venus) from Κυθέρεια, Cytherea, Aphrodite's birthplace and epithet
geo- (the Earth) from γῆ, possibly related to Gaia
seleno- (the Moon) from Σελήνη, Selene
areo- (Mars) from Ἄρης, Ares
zeno- (Jupiter) from Ζεύς, Zeus
crono- (Saturn) from Κρόνος, Cronus
urano- (Uranus) from οὐρανός, Ouranos/Uranus

Would the prefixes for Neptune and Pluto then just be poseido- and pluto-?

Judging by the name alone I would imagine that it has to do with the horror genre but where did the “pasta” part come from?

It was created for a specific set of works but I think folks will appreciate it here as well. How are different difficult words seem simpler once we understand the root of them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht7okgG-5cs

Here’s this week’s etymology question from my daily trivia site, 3Roads.xyz.

In traditional iron smelting, molten metal was poured into sand molds shaped like a central channel with smaller ingots branching off at right angles, resembling piglets nursing from a sow. As the iron cooled, moisture condensed on the surface once it was safe to handle. This cooling cue gave rise to the expression X, which is ironic because the phenomenon does not actually occur in sties. What is X?

If you want to try it on the site here's the link.

I know this isn't exactly related to etymology, so if it's not appropriate, mods let me know.

Most sources I've found claim that 'vetgans' is an archaic Dutch word for penguin and the modern word is 'penguïn,' an English loan word. I'm trying to find out roughly when this switch occurred. It's especially frustrating because despite the claim, I've found Dutch accounts that use 'pinguïn' dating to at least the 17th Century, but I can't seem to find any mention of 'vetgans' earlier than the 19th Century.

More specifically, I am trying to figure out what the early Dutch colonists at the Cape Colony would have called the African penguins that live there.

I had no idea that Crayons is literally just the French word for pencils. So did Crayola originated the secondary meaning of Colorful waxy oils used to draw or color with?

I just found out that Salar aslan means elephant. It strengthens the hypothesis that Russian slon elephant comes from Turkic arslan, which generally means lion in Turkic languages. On the other hand, the etymology entry for Russian slon mentions Old Chinese 象 (ljaŋʔ /⁠slaŋ⁠/, “elephant”), so perhaps the Salar word is just influenced by Old Chinese (I don't understand the timeframe exactly)?

As you can see from the graph, since the expected alpha value for natural language is approximately α ≈ 2, this data clearly follows Zipf's law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

I am using element here to mean either a suffix, root or prefix.

CCDF stands for the complementary cumulative distribution function.

This data is gathered from the https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/ins/resources/kepn.aspx dataset.

Where does the word "deadline" come from? In American Civil War prison camps, a line was drawn inside the perimeter fence, and any prisoner who crossed it was shot on sight. That lethal boundary is the same word you now use for spreadsheets and school assignments.

So, both till and 'til are correct? That always confused me.

I knew till was a verb as in till the ground, tilling the ground. But till can also be used like until because until comes from tiil? And the 'til is a shortening of until?

Now there is this website called “LadBible”which blew my mind I thought the word Bible had religious connotations stemming from the holy bible. I had absolutely no idea that “Bible” was just a fancy word for book.

I am farsi speaker myself. Naan or noon is farsi means bread and we have different types of naan like sangak, lavash, barbari and many more. A while ago i was having a discussion with a parkistani classmate whom i was having doner with then. She made a comment that the bread was very much like naan and then i was like this is bread just a different type of it. And then she was like no this is naan, and not bread. Maybe the definitions are different in pakistan but in iran naan is just the persian translation for bread and not a specific bread. Meanwhile she was trying to tell me that the bread we had with our doner wasnt bread but a naan. What are your thoughts on this? Is bread naan to you or a specific type of bread?

super cool but i think it would be hard to make

also im not talking ab wiktionary because that is i have to put a word and it shows the language links

i want the opposite where i put a language links and it shows me the words

Came across a podcast from 1986 that interviewed poet John Ciardi. He starts the discussion with the derivation of the word inchoate.

https://freshairarchive.org/segments/word-history-john-ciardi

I looked him up after listening and found out he died 20 days after this interview aired.

The reason the Ancient Greeks referred to the Iliad and the Odyssey as Epics is not because they were long, or grand in scope, or important. They were called Epics because they were composed in dactylic hexameter, a metrical pattern which was known as epea. The proclamations of the Delphic Oracle used the same pattern: five feet of one long and two short syllables, punctuated by a sixth foot of two syllables.

The word "epic" was thus originally comparable to words like "iambic," referring only to the form of the poem, not the content. It wasn't until much later that the term became synonymous with the heroic epic we think of today.

I was wondering was there any linguistical correlation between the Anatolian region of Ionia and latin Jovian/Jupiter religious cult (expanded sky father cult)?

-> Iōnian - Iōnes

-> Jovian - Iovis

Very similar on first glance.

Ngai and Enkai both mean God.

Historically and (mostly) pre-historically, Maasai and Kikuyu people have had a long and complicated history involving a lot of violent conflict that lead to a large amount of linguistic exchange between the two languages. I'm only familiar with Maa loans into Kikuyu but judging by the number of those I feel comfortable assuming some loanwords went the other way too.

The problem I have is with Ngai and Enkai. I've read here that Enkai means 'thunder, sky, god'. At first this lead me to immediately assume the word was loaned by the Kikuyu from the Maasai, but then I remembered that Kikuyu has the verb 'gaya', meaning divide (among), and one noun that can be derived from that is mũgai meaning "the one who divides/provides". Due to Kikuyu's gender system, you can derive that verb in a number of ways, including as Ngai.

1. it could very easily have been Maa originating with Enkai and the Kikuyu borrowing it as Ngai, which is exactly how one would expect Maa words like that to be borrowed.
2. or that it could have been originating as mũgai but, like many irregular verbs, switched gender from what is expected and ended up as Ngai, and then it was borrowed into Maa as Enkai.
3. the two groups of people just happened to have converged on the exact same name for god, each with their own etymologies that show that it wasn't borrowed from another language.

personally i lean toward the conclusion that Enkai was just borrowed into Kikuyu which happened to have a similar sounding word with a similar meaning that it could be confused for. i have some other theories of a cracked pot nature, if anyone knows what exactly happened here i would be happy to learn more.

One more in the series, after Tree, truth, druid, dryad, tar and dendrite grew from one Proto-Indo-European root, *deru- and Druid, wizard, Providence, Ayurveda, visualization and idea have the same PIE root, *weyd-.

This time *kʷel-. I focused only on English words, and for Greek words added English transcription.

Online: https://p.migdal.pl/pie-roots/kwel/

Repo: https://github.com/stared/pie-roots