barrel, metaphor, Veronica, amphora, offer, Lucifer, ferret, wheelbarrow, tidal bore, birthday
Latin Mercury is fairly mysterious. Mercury as a god of commerce seems obviously related to merx: "merchandise, commodity", and in Faliscan and possibly Oscan votive tablets, a cognate to merx (or rather its dative mercii as expected in context) appears as a divine name: Mercui, Mirikui. But in Latin …
read moreOne neat discovery in this family is that English has words from three different compoundings of *h₃ekʷ- with *h₂énti: "opposite, near, in front" three different times: compounded in Proto-Indo-European *h₂énti-h₃kʷós goes through Latin antiquus to give antique and antic; compounded again in Late Latin as *anteocularis it goes through …
read moreI met a baby Elowen last week. After initially wondering if it was another example of -wen, I found that it was actually the singulative suffix -en on Cornish elow: "elms"—the equivalent of Welsh llwyfen: "elm", llwyf: "elms".
*h₁elmos: "wych elm (Ulmus glabra)" shows up with identical meaning …
read moreProto-Indo-European *h₂ew: "away from, since, again" cannot be formally tied to *h₂epó: "off, away", but the similarity is suggestive. Perhaps Pre-Proto-Indo-European *b became either *p (by fortition) or *w (by lenition) in almost all cases, accounting for the paucity of *b in PIE.
In any case, the later (re …
read moreDr. Melenaite Taumoefolau makes a compelling and intriguing argument: that Nuclear Polynesian *sawaiki: "traditional/mythological homeland"—whence Hawaii—may be a cognate of *sau ʔariki borrowed from the Tongic branch into Nuclear Polynesian. (Note that *sawaiki can only be reconstructed to NP, it is not present in Tongic or …
read morework, work, energy, George, liturgy, surgeon, organic
arctic, Ursa Major, Arthur, Miranda, smile
I've been doing Word Families for 5 years! In that time, I have made 150 families! So this week is *pénkʷe: "five".
The *p-kʷ sequence in *pénkʷe leads to a set highly divergent forms. *kʷ is a highly variable sound on its own, becoming /kw/, /w/, /ʍ/, /k/, /t …
read moreJune is for Justice. Justice is Life. ✊🏿✊🏽✊🏼 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
Ayurveda, hygiene, forever, not, age, eternal, medieval, young, June, jury, injury, prejudice, justice
This is quite a large family with a number of borrowings into other language families. Because, it turns out, the Indo-European speakers' relationship with wheels is pretty important in a lot of people's history, like the Sumerians' relationship with reeds.
There is also a root *wel(h₁)-: "to turn …
read moreProto-Indo-European has *gʷṓws: "cow, cattle" and possible *woḱéh₂: "(female) cow".
And some other likely descendants of (the same?) Central Asian substrate words for "cattle": Sino-Tibetan *ŋwa: "cattle, ox", West Semitic *baḳar-: "cattle, ox"
cow, butter, botany, beef, vaccine
I get a little speculative here, if not downright provocative. There are words for dog all over Eurasia that recall each other. These could be onomatopoeic, but they do not much resemble the common forms you find in words that actually used as dog sound …
read morebleach, blank, black, blue, beluga, flame, Baltic, pool
This is 98th Word Family in 98 weeks. As I close in on 100, I'm doing two families inspired by comments on the very first family. In this case, the comment "I found recently that the words bison and weasel come from the same …
read moreTying Minoan (Cretan) Phaistos and Greek Hephaestus in to this family is speculative, but not as wild a reach as it first looks like.
Hephaestus and Phaistos, Crete:
We usually represent the name as Hephaestus in the Roman alphabet, after Roman transliteration traditions, but (as …
read moreNext week, the sister of Phoenix.
win, wish, Venus, Darwin, vanadium, venom, wonder, winsome
Bonus word family for Halloween by special request from my 4 year old: witch from *weyk-: "to separate, to choose, to consecrate".
*weyk- looks like an extended root implying *wey-, but I can't find any clear evidence for that root. If it is an extension of *wey-, a zero-grade …
read morecomplete, supply, full, poly-, folk, filbert
hall, cellar, eyelid, color, hell, apocalypse
June's theme is linguistic influence early Iron Age Celtic. The rest of the month will focus on words that were borrowed from Gaulish into Latin (more things like the aside in today's families that the very iconic Latin word gladius being borrowed from Gaulish …
read moremother, material, Manchester, mammal
wind, window, nirvana, vent, vent, weather, athlete, fan, atmosphere
stun, tornado, detonate, Thor, thunder, blunderbus
This is the family that no matter how long I work on it, it's never done. That's what I get for trying to explore the possibility that two extremely important and productive roots may be connected: *h₂er-, related to cosmic order, and *h₃reǵ-, related to societal …
read more*bʰewdʰ- vs. *gʷʰedʰ-: two families that end up being super confusing in Germanic languages, since *bʰ and *gʷʰ merge at the beginning of a word. In English, they end up being homophones with complementary/opposite meanings: "offer" vs. "ask for".
I had to do these two …
read moreWe start religion words with *dyḗwos ph₂tḗr, Old Father Shining-Sky himself.
Interestingly English "day" is not from this root, despite similarity to many IE words for "day", e.g. Latin diēs, etc. Germanic *d corresponds to Latin f (PIE *dʰ); Latin d corresponds to Germanic *t …
read moreFor 2017-07-07, I just had to do "seven".
It may seems strange to see the word for "seven" borrowed around between so many different language families, when the numbers 1-10 are so highly conserved in descendants of (post-Anatolian) Proto-Indo-European. But 10-based number systems seem to not …
read moreIt is the right and proper state of a people or nation to be free, generous, honorable, hairy, libertine, and liberal children and vegetables.
liberty, deliver, Loðbrok, Luther
The root *h₂ews-: "sunrise" may be connected to *h₂ew-: "away from, since, again" and *h₂ewg-: "to increase, to enlarge", compare for example *h₂éwgeh₂: "sunrise, dawn" (literally, "the increase") from *h₂ewg-.
Eärendil, Easter, air, soar, east, Austria, Australia, early
hippopotamus, equestrian, zebra, alfalfa, Azores
mirror, admire, miracle, Miranda, smile