3 ms·
from Indoeuropean "gwen" over scandinavian "kvinna" = Woman
by CLPadvocate 10mo ago
from Indoeuropean "gwen" over scandinavian "kvinna" = Woman
- shantara 10mo agoThank you. I knew “woman” is “kvinder” in Danish, but I never made the connection with the English word for “queen”.
- memsom 10mo ago"Queen" came from "The king and his queen". There is no common word for Queen in Germanic languages, and for what ever reason Queen became synonymous with royalty. Originally it just mean "the king and his woman", but I don't know when it changed. Certainly we had more than one word for "adult female human" in old English.
- atiedebee 10mo ago> There is no common word for Queen in Germanic languages Correct me if I am misunderstanding what you meant, but Dutch has koningin and German has Königin? They are basically a feminized version of king.
- aitchnyu 10mo agoDid Japanese get a similar word by coincidence?
- pjc50 10mo agohttps://jisho.org/search/queen https://jisho.org/search/queen : which word did you mean? The translator's curse of a language having lots of synonyms, the subtleties of which don't map directly on to English. None of those seem particularly similar to queen/kvinne?
- aitchnyu 10mo agoI mean https://jisho.org/word/%E5%A5%B3 https://jisho.org/word/%E5%A5%B3
- stared 10mo agoThere is a nice "all women are queen, literally", https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kOY-vXuAiBA https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kOY-vXuAiBA And a longer text, https://blog.oup.com/2011/10/wife/ https://blog.oup.com/2011/10/wife/ Also, gynecology has the same roots.
- DonaldFisk 10mo agoAnother cognate is Classical Greek γυνή, whence gynaecology.