alt.hn

7/31/2026 at 11:13:03 PM

Why etymologies matter: How tracing words can illuminate history (2024)

 https://resobscura.substack.com/p/why-i-love-etymologies

by benbreen

8/4/2026 at 1:14:34 PM

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.

by satvikpendem

8/4/2026 at 7:17:05 PM

+1 on Proto. It focuses on the tremendous amount of information revealed by DNA analysis, and it weaves this together with historical linguistics and archeology.

by euroderf

8/4/2026 at 4:42:49 PM

A book I enjoyed in a similar vain is "Wordslut", it's an exploration of the etymology of various English words (mostly pejoratives today) and the difference in language use between genders. It's more sociolinguistics than linguistics, but a good read.

by Insanity

8/4/2026 at 7:32:50 PM

I love the etymology of the word "world" it's a combination of:

weraz = “man” and aldiz = “age, lifetime”.

Literally meaning “era/age of man”

by jonash54

8/4/2026 at 2:14:56 PM

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.

by keiferski

8/4/2026 at 12:44:12 PM

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

by adzm

8/4/2026 at 3:22:09 PM

The demons come out when centering

by tys-

8/4/2026 at 12:56:48 PM

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.

by hiccuphippo

8/4/2026 at 1:58:36 PM

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?"

by mcswell

8/4/2026 at 3:12:35 PM

Joke needs tweaking to take into account that all large bronze sculptures are hollow.

by card_zero

8/4/2026 at 4:37:48 PM

Meanwhile German independently had the word "hallo", which appears in writing since the 15th century, used to call for the ferry man or to call to your dogs on the hunt (meaning something like "fetch"). Then the telephone made "hello" popular in English, and suddenly the word "hallo" becomes popular as a greeting in German

We just picked the closest existing German word to take the same meaning as the English word. But at the same time, the etymologies of hallo and hello cross over at various times before the invention of the telephone (One etymology of Hello is that it derives from Halloo, a call to a ferry man)

Etymologies can be really weird at times

by wongarsu

8/4/2026 at 1:59:20 PM

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.

by thadt

8/4/2026 at 5:16:58 PM

>Alo in Spanish, which is only used as a greeting over the phone and never as a general greeting

Eh, kind of. Imagine you're in a warehouse and you can't see anyone but you think someone may be in earshot. You could get their attention with aló. It's sort of an uncertain greeting, when you don't know who or if someone is on the other side.

by fluoridation

8/4/2026 at 2:16:48 PM

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.

by mirmor23

8/4/2026 at 5:10:58 PM

>vindicate vs vindictive

I don't think this is a good example of cognates diverging in meaning. They're both more or less kinds of avenging or counter-attacking. When you vindicate something you are responding to some attack made against it, and when something is vindictive it responds to attacks with attacks of its own.

by fluoridation

8/4/2026 at 3:01:36 PM

Thrift was formerly a word for profits, now it makes sense. But I recognize the snowclone as a popular 16th century way to form personal verb-noun descriptors like cutpurse, upstart, sawbones, spoilsport, dreadnought. This is still productive because midwit is a recent addition. (Eh, I suppose mid isn't a verb, but I think it's the same pattern.)

by card_zero

8/4/2026 at 4:16:21 PM

Huh! Spanish and Portuguese still use this pattern (verb+noun → noun), like Spanish matafuego 'fire extinguisher' (literally 'killfire'), Spanish rascacielos (literally 'scrapeskies'), Portguese arranha-ceu (literally 'scrape-sky').

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Spanish_verb-object_...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Portuguese_verb-noun...

(Spanish does this more than Portuguese, but also Wiktionary has been more thorough in categorizing the Spanish examples compared to the Portuguese examples.)

It's cool to be reminded that this pattern also has a history in English.

Another example I was thinking of, pasatiempo/passatempo, actually has an exact English equivalent, pastime.

by schoen

8/4/2026 at 3:56:08 PM

the etymology of snowclone itself is amusing ;)

by mirmor23

8/4/2026 at 5:32:36 PM

[dead]

by chetanvaity

8/4/2026 at 12:24:32 PM

[flagged]

by allgirl