4 ms·
If you get interested in etymology, you'll see that each language encodes the history of who spoke it during the time it was forming and changing (which continu
by ageitgey 5y ago
If you get interested in etymology, you'll see that each language encodes the history of who spoke it during the time it was forming and changing (which continues into the present). There's lots to be learned about history by studying languages.
One of my favorite examples is the word "sky". Sky comes from the old norse [1] for "cloud" or "obscured". Presumably when Old English developed on the British Isles, the sky was generally full of clouds. So when they needed a word for the thing above them, they seemingly borrowed the world for "cloudy" instead of "sunny". That probably wouldn't have happened if English developed somewhere with better weather.
[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/sky https://www.etymonline.com/word/sky
- memsom 5y agoThis happens a lot in English. English has a lot of meaning drift, even in native words from Anglo Saxon. For example, deer used to mean any animal, but you have hound (any dog), meat (any food), fowl (any bird), and many, many more. You even have stuff like wrist, where it means "joint between hand and arm" in English, by vrist in Swedish means ankle. In earlier proto Germanic I believe it meant multiple things and each language just picked something quite randomly.
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoYep and "man" used to mean human, with "Wer" and "Wif" distinguishing the genders. It only became masculine-specific later.
- kseistrup 5y agoEven today, the word for “cloud” is “sky” in both Danish and Norwegian. While the primary meaning for “sky” is “cloud”, a more rarely found form, “i sky” (literally “in cloud”), means “in the sky”.
- sgt 5y agoSky in English is basically the same. It originally meant something that obscures, upwards into the heavens. Presumably people were quite used to clouds. Looking at the etymology of the word, one finds sky in Old Norse, skiwja in Proto-Germanic, similar in Old English and Old Saxon all the way to Proto-Indo-European skewH (to "cover, bedeck"). Look at wiktionary.org - hours of fun.
- involans 5y agoThe Greek for sky (ουρανός/Uranus) is etymologically related to words for rain (see: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BF%E1%BD%90%CF%81%CE%B1%CE%BD%CF%8C%CF%82#Ancient_Greek https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BF%E1%BD%90%CF%81%CE%B1...). Greece isn't known for its abundant rainfall. It is actually fairly normal to name the sky for the things it has in it (clouds, rain, etc), and it is not a strong indicator of how good the weather is.
- 0xdada 5y agoI had to go and dig up this old HN comment (and the radiolab episode it references): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11580007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11580007.