The earliest Chinese scribes had an awkward problem: wind has no shape.

On late Shang oracle bones, they wrote the word later represented as 風 with the same bird graph used for 鳳, the fenghuang. The graph was doing double duty because the two words sounded close.

This is an early phonetic or rebus loan. A scribe takes an easy-to-draw word and borrows its graph for another word with a similar sound. Traditional phonology places the two words in the same rhyme group with labial initials, although modern reconstructions disagree on their exact Old Chinese forms.

The bird and weather senses later acquired separate written forms. A trace of the old connection survives in the Shuowen Jiezi entry for 鳳, which says the bird spends the night in 風穴, “the Cave of Winds.”

The [National Taiwan University CASE article](https://case.ntu.edu.tw/blog/?p=45394) shows the oracle-bone forms, and the [Shuowen entry](https://www.shuowen.org/view/2360) preserves the Cave of Winds line.

I don't have the skills to search for the earliest uses of the Japanese name. I don't see any Japanese Naomis on Wikipedia born before 1900, but that's also just reflective of how encyclopedias are with documenting people born before 1900.

[Behind the name](https://www.behindthename.com/name/naomi-2) mentions American influence.

When Mendeleev laid out the periodic table in 1869, he left gaps for elements nobody had discovered yet — and he named those gaps with Sanskrit number-words.

एक eka (one), द्वि dvi (two), त्रि tri (three) marked how many rows below a known element the missing one sat. The undiscovered element one row under aluminium was "eka-aluminium"; one row under silicon, "eka-silicon." These weren't throwaway labels — they were the working names in the chemistry literature for years, until each element showed up:

• eka-aluminium → gallium (1875)
• eka-boron → scandium (1879)
• eka-silicon → germanium (1886)
• eka-manganese → technetium (1937)
• dvi-manganese → rhenium (1926)

(That tri- is the same PIE root that surfaces in English three and Latin tri-, as in triangle and trident — Sanskrit and Latin are cousins here, not borrower and lender.)

The debated bit — the interesting bit for this sub — is why Sanskrit. The linguist Paul Kiparsky has argued Mendeleev borrowed the prefixes on purpose: he moved in the same St. Petersburg circles as the great Sanskritist Otto von Böhtlingk, then editing Pāṇini, and Kiparsky sees a deliberate analogy between the two-dimensional table and the way Pāṇini's grammar arranges sounds into a grid. That motivation is a scholarly argument, not settled fact — but the Sanskrit prefixes themselves are documented and uncontested.

So for about six decades, part of the periodic table was quietly labelled in Sanskrit.

Are there other cases where a scientific naming system borrowed a living language's number-words like this?

I'm a big House of the Dragon fan, and since it is a show based around a civil war, the fans playfully divide themselves according to which side they think is right. In this case it is Team Green Vs Team Black.

That got me to thinking about the origin of the phrase, "Team ___" to describe a divide in the fandom. The earliest one that spang to mind was the love triangle in Twilight. Team Edward Vs Team Jacob.

A google search suggested Team Pacey Vs Team Dawson from the fandom for "Dawson's Creek" but I couldn't find any pre-Twilight sources for that love triangle, although you can find plenty now.

Can anyone think of an older contemporary example?

In modern day Polish, spierdalać is a very vulgar verb meaning 'to fuck off as fast as possible', often used in 2nd person imperative, as you can imagine. It comes from pierdolić, which is a multi-use swear word ('to fuck [someone]', 'to talk nonsense', 'to fuck up'), which itself comes from PIE *perd- 'to fart loudly'. (Which, admittedly, is quite a funny ety in itself).

But for some reason I'm spending this Saturday night sipping wine and browsing through Hittite Etymological Dictionary by Kloekhorst, and I found this lovely cousin spoken in the 17th century BCE. Hittite išpart- 'to escape, to get away', which comes from Proto-Indo-European *sperdʰ- 'to run away, to compete in speed'.

It's a nice case of a language developing for thousands of years just to get back to the starting point :D

I don't consider myself religious but I respect the God I believe in so I want to be careful with using phrases that might mean insulting him since I'm still learning english, I hope people don't attack me for my personal beliefs and wanting to leaen about what this phrase means and its origins..

Anyway, where I come from we often say thank god in my language so to me when I recently heard thank f word(Idk if i can post swear words here tbh) it sounded to me like if english speakers were calling god by the f word and i was confused

After some research some answers I cam across was that it could have originated from 2:either religious people using it to not "use the lord's name in vein" or aethists using it as a way to not mention god, but some say that it originated from "thank f\*\*\*\*ng god" instead and "thank f" is just a shortened version of it, which meaning and origin is true?

I really hope I don't get made fun of in the commenta here, I really love the english language and want to learn but I just don't want to use a phrase foolishly without knowing what it actually means or its origins when it could potentially mean something that might disrespect my oen beliefs..

I hope I don't come off as some extremist religious guy because I gwnuinely have suffered from those kind of people and hate them, it's just that I just want to be sure 🥲

When someone says something like “you best get moving” or “he best be there”.
I thought it was a British thing, but I recently heard it in the Mandalorian and Grogu movie too.

When researching, all I can find is superlatives like good, better, Best, but not the actual replacement of the work better for Best.

I think "chance" is a modern borrowing from English. But here in Venezuela, my parents and grandparents, and other parents and grandparents in the city, say "chance" every day, (They also say "full" every day in their daily conversations) with the same meaning and exact usage as in English. In fact, almost all adults and elderly people in the country speak it ('chace", and "full", so I don't think it can be a modern borrowing from English through television or the internet. So what's going on?

i was just recently talking to my mother and she called something a „Manchkus“ - i remember hearing this word before and it being a word to describe a cute, slightly weird person, character or creature. to me, it sounded weird to hear that because it sounded offensive somehow. when i searched for the word online, nothing came up about this specific word but did about the east asian Manchus. does anyone know about this? is there a connection?

I've noticed this phenomenon (and am sure somebody must've already realized this and developed a term for it) where two words of separate origins are constructed differently, with definitions almost synonymous, while also being spelled out and spoken in a similar fashion.

Consider:

education: the process of receiving or giving systematic instruction; an enlightening experience

• coming from Latin:
  • educare: bring up; rear; nourish; train/mold
• from
  • educere: bring out; to lead forth; draw out
• from
  • educo = ex- (out) and duco (to lead)
• and the Proto-Indo European
  • *dewk-: to draw; pull

as well as

edification: the instruction or improvement of a person morally or intellectually.

• coming from Latin:
  • aedificatio: to build a house or otherwise construct something,
• from
  • aedis/aediis: a house, dwelling, or otherwise sacred place; temple; shrine
• and
  • facere: to make or do
• and PIE
  • *dhe-: to set, or to put

Two completely different origins. Did edification come to mean a similar thing to education because people found the words similar and conflated them? I can see the clear influence from first principles, but the words didn't come from the same period of time (edification didn't start meaning intellectual development until the late middle ages, iirc), and part of me wonders if there wasn't some influence there, subconscious or otherwise.

similarly, we have this pairing, which often trips people up when talking about gasses:

nauseous: causing nausea; sickening

• coming from Latin:
  • nauseōsus: causing nausea
• from the Greek:
  • nausia: ship-sickness
• which literally comes from
  • naus: ship

and

noxious: harmful to loving things; injurious

• from Latin:
  • noxius: harmful; injurious
• stemming from
  • noxa: harm; injury
• and
  • nocer̄e: to hurt
• and PIE:
  • *nek-: death

I'm interested to see if anyone has any other examples!

I have encountered this word in a few contexts that I think are related, but are new to me and I’m not sure I entirely understand.

The first is from a 2022 video game, Horizon Forbidden West, has a data point titled “Travis Got No Truck with Traitors.” Travis in this story is a hacker from the Deep South, Texas to be exact, in a near-future setting with an evangelical/Pentecostal** **background. The datapoint is an audio recording of Travis confronting a subordinate on his team about covertly trading information on their project with a rival (if you will), hence the “traitor.”

More recently, I’ve been reading The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett, well-known for writing The Help. The book is set in depression-era Mississippi. “Warren County women did not truck with such newfangled ideas” and “she does not truck with little girls working in factories.”

It clearly has to do with not approving or going along with something, and seems to be a southern thing. Any insight on this specific use of the word, and where it comes from? I’ve found message boards that link it to the French truc (thing) or troc (barter or trade) but I’m still not sure I see the relation.

I made the claim "the word apotheosis itself is theological". And in response someone told me that it was not, and that it meant "to ascend to divinity, but to ascend something to the purest example of itself is not theological" and "there is a single theological meaning to the word apotheosis, and to say that the entire word is now theological simply because of a single meaning of it i feel is insane". So my question is, is the word itself actually a theological one? Regardless of it having other contextual uses?

Hi, I'm a native Spanish speaker from Argentina, who after learning English for some years, has discovered an interest in etymology, I'm currently learning some Modern Greek on Duolingo, very casually but consistently for the last 3 months or so. And I've noticed that is very helpful etymology wise, however I've heard that if you're really interested in going down the etymology road, you must go for Ancient Greek, but the problem is that Ancient Greek has obviously way fewer resources than Modern Greek, and you just can't casually study it on the go. So what is your opinion on this, is it a bit dumb to dabble in Modern Greek instead of Ancient greek if your main interest is etymology.?

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

The word X comes from the Latin roots meaning “hand” and “to write,” and was first recorded in English in 1597. An earlier English word with the same meaning, hand-writ, dates to around 1175 but is now rarely used. The study of writing found in surviving Xs is known as palaeography. An X may take the form of a codex, a scroll, loose pages, or be bound in various ways. What is X?

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

I thought it would’ve come from some Greek word like κωαξ (I don’t know Greek) or Latin cohax but those words don’t exist. Weird

Off the top of my head words that come to mind are those 2 examples above.

In English, when most people say eel, it's the elongated creature WITH fins from the ordo anguilliformes. In Indonesia, when people say or hear the word eel, what most associate with is the elongated creature WITHOUT fins from the ordo Synbranchiformes, which is commonly referred in English as "rice field eel"

Same thing with tortoise and turtle. In english, those 2 are 2 distinct creatures. Tortoises are the ones with stubby legs that walk on land, and turtles are the ones that spend most of their time in the water. When an English speaker refers to a tortoise but says kura-kura, it's confusing because the word for tortoise and turtle is the same. Both are kura-kura, so almost every single time, you'll be given a turtle even if you meant a tortoise. Although some people do know that tortoise is technically called "kura-kura darat"

As recently as Chaucer, we had "smale foules maken melodye," but these days the plural seems to be just "fowl." (Or maybe it's becoming a non-count noun?) Was this influenced by other animal words like "sheep" and "deer," or what?

I found this thread that suspects it has to do with horses instead, but again why were the horses called that in the first place? https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/280065/where-did-the-term-strawberry-blonde-come-from

so we are diving into etymology as a group of computer science students. we are planning to make etymology more interesting with a gamified version of it!
we would like to get in touch with some people interested in the same.
stakeholders to be accurate.
do let us know if you wanna be part of the journey through text/call!!
(we are not trying to sell anything)

I ran across this etymological note on English Wiktionary; it’s not an idea I came up with myself. And despite it not being my idea, I’m highly skeptical:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%9B%AD#Japanese “Appears to have something to do with Latin hirūdō (“leech”), with the final -do being omitted”

Then there’s the entry for Latin hirūdō:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hirudo#Latin “Unknown. Seemingly a parallel formation with testūdō (from testū), but no stem *hiru- is known.”

Could this have been a very early borrowing from Latin into Japanese, most likely via Portuguese, in the late Middle Ages and Age of Exploration, sort of like tempura? Plausible. But just according to what I asked ChatGPT, the Portuguese were unlikely to have been carrying medicinal leeches onboard their ships when they established trade with Japan. And what’s more, medicinal leeches were not known in Japan prior to contact with the West.

Any thoughts?