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So I'm assuming there is some cognate to "periphery" in portugese -- a portugese word that sounds very similar to that, becuase of shared Latin etymology. so i
by jrochkind1 5y ago
So I'm assuming there is some cognate to "periphery" in portugese -- a portugese word that sounds very similar to that, becuase of shared Latin etymology.
so it's not that that word isn't fancy in portugese too. It's that that word might come easier to a portugese (or other romance language) speaker, since it's a cognate, so they use it, and end up sounding fancy in English.
An English speaker could do the same thing in portugese with the same words in reverse!
- carlosf 5y agoExactly, periferia.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y agoOnly it comes (through Latin) from Greek :)
- robocat 5y agoI notice I use some obscure words when speaking Spanish because there is a similar obscure word in English. I even guess at words by taking what I think is an English word with a latin root, and converting it to Spanish, which sometimes works really well and at other times it doesn’t work quite so well at all!
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> I'm assuming there is some cognate to "periphery" in portugese -- a portugese word that sounds very similar to that, becuase of shared Latin etymology. "Periphery" does not have Latin etymology. "Peri" is overtly Greek, and so is "ph". The Latinate version would be "circumference".
- dragonwriter 5y ago> "Periphery" does not have Latin etymology. Yes, the English word (and the Portuguese cognate, periferia) does have a Latin etymology, via Late and Medieval Latin peripheria. Now, the Latin word peripheria itself has a Greek etymology, from Greek periphereia. But both Portuguese and English get their word via Latin (and, in the English case, possibly also French, which also gets it from Latin, though sources differ on whether English got it from French or directly from Medieval Latin, and its plausibly not uniquely one or the other.)