User:Soap/etymsearch

This page is for honest speculation about the etymologies of words. The "fun" page, at User:Soap/etymfun, contains thoughts on what linguists might come up with if the English language and its close relatives were only just now being discovered from afar.

New World Order

23:17, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

I'd always thought New World Order was a calque of Latin novus ordo seclorum, and I dont think anyone told me it was ... it's just the most obvious translation of the three-word Latin phrase. Our etymology says New World Order was popularized in 1940, but that doesnt specifically deny that it comes from the Latin phrase. Even if "new order of the ages" is truer to the original Latin, New World Order is certainly easier to say. And Im not fully convinced I was wrong, since the concepts of world and age overlap in at least ancient Greek, Latin (e.g. "secular"), and English.

optics

-σις etymology probably wrong. at best, it is a guess. it would make sense if the original suffix were /-tʲis/, but this requires analogy.

tick-teach-toe

The word tick might be the direct English cognate of digitus (“finger”), alongside toe which is also cognate. It is not unheard of for a word to split in this manner. One weak point in the theory is that no Germanic language preserves tick as a word meaning finger, but it may have first changed into a verb, and then come to be associated with sound symbolism, particularly in the early modern era with the invention of clocks and other machinery capable of making sharp sounds that our hands cannot.

One possible related word is tickle, a verbal frequentative just like fondle, nestle, cuddle, and the like. Since tickling can only be done with the fingers, the semantic path is clear. Another possible derivative is teach; one lesser-used definition of teacher is a pointing hand or index finger.

toe

I would like to know how the word toe evolved from proto-Germanic tīhwaną "show, announce". The cognate we give is Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/taihwǭ, but this seems weak for two reasons .... there is no explanation of the origin of /hʷ/, and since it has a cognate meaning finger in Latin, it makes me wonder if it already meant finger in pre-proto-Germanic or even PIE; if so, we would be saying it changed from finger to "show, announce" and then to toe, instead of straightforwardly from finger to toe. And who among us has such flexible feet, anyway, that we would get our word for toe from a verb meaning "show, announce"?

take

15:21, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

Might the many problems with the Germanic etymology here be resolved by tying it to the digit root instead? This would itself present problems, but at least digit is attested outside the family, whereas the single non-Germanic cognate of tēkaną is a dubious Tocharian verb that has /t/ representing PIE /d/.

speculoos

20:22, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

no apparent reason for the name of a cookie to come from the word for "speculate". etymology just leads us down a blind path.

lick

20:22, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

How did lick evolve from stroking something with one's tongue to beating up a fellow human being? was the first person who used the word this way embarrassed?

Eelam

13:34, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

Did they really name their country after palm wine?

OBSCENE

07:56, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Not one person thinks it might come from ob- + scene. Perhaps the word scene, known to be a Greek loan, is also known to have entered Latin after the word obscene was already attested. But otherwise it seems the most obvious explanation for the irregular -s- in obscene.

Unsorted list

Contradictory or tangled etymologies

• traht#Old_English <--- native or borrowed?
• parent and apparent have tangled etymologies. there are two unrelated Latin verbs involved but on some pages we say theyre the same

short vowels in diminutives

11:43, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

• chink small opening = chine + -ock, perhaps through unattested intermediary chinnock. does -ock occur only after doubled consonants? if so, does the suffix automatically double any preceding consonant? there are some exceptions in Category:English_terms_suffixed_with_-ock, but all seem readily explainable ... e.g. playock had no consoinant to double, and paltock was already doubnle.
• in the nuddy
• "YouTubby"
• beetle, if from an earlier form like *bittle
• whatever else i had on the old list

See w:Kluge's Law for a possible explanation, which also applies to other Germanic languages

liver

if live and liver are cognates, it seems, surprisingly, that liver is closest to the original sense and that the -er is not the agentive as I had assumed. I dont know what it is. see Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/librō.,

phynance or fisics?

color, charm, and various Greek letter terms such as gamma decay all have (unrelated) meanings in both physics and finance. Is it a coincidence or a tribute? Im certain that physics did not borrow them from finance, unless it has somehow eluded us all, so I might look for the coining publications in finance to see if they mention physics. See also #metroid below.

vega <--- or maybe there are only so many words

the matrix

Latin uterus shows irregular shift of /der/ > /ter/. Latin has three words that show a similar shift: taeter, vitrum, and uter, all of which have -tr- in their inflected forms. Is it possible that uterus once underwent a ....
....
....
....
contraction?

metroid

Possible to find use of metroid as a common noun? there is no English metroid entry now, but since metro- just means "womb; mother", it is a theoretically valid word. In any case, the word metroid appears in a math paper at [1], and in A. DRESS AND T. HAVEL, Some combinatorial properties of discriminants in metric vector spaces, Adn Math. 62 (1986), 285-312., released in the same year as the video game. This could either be a coincidence or a tribute to the game, and in either case I suspect the word is superficially parseable as metric + -oid, being closely paired to matroid. (Adn Math might be a scan error or an unusual abbreviation for Advanced Math or Advances in Mathematics, and it may be that these two phrases are in fact the same journal.)

an unrelated use of the phrase metroid lineage appears in https://www.google.com/books/edition/Insect_Systematics_Evolution/bH4jAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=metroid%20lineage, but it is probably a hyphenated word, perhaps geometroid, since it is narrowly typed and there is no way to see what is above.

As the game surprised us with a female protagonist I wanted to believe that the word was derived from the Greek word for womb. One other person said this, but I think it's most likely now that this is a coincidence.

Nintendo now claims that the word metroid is a portmanteau of metro and, of all things, android. I have seen similar "explanations" of other video game names and I don't believe them. I can't rule it out, but it makes very little sense. If anything, given that the game takes place on an alien planet, our collective childhood pronunciation as meteoroid makes more sense.

unsorted list

words in this section are either based on personal intuition (and unlikely to be true) or words which i've researched and come up with nothing. thus, i want them on a separate, lower priority list. i feel no shame at anything i get wrong in this section.

clam(p)

same word or not? clam / clamp. i dont know of any suffix -p in Gmc that would unite the two

jamoke

growing up i always thought jamoke was from the italian name Giacomo, with the consonants switched on purpose to suggest hte meaning of someone who gets things wrong. the etymology we give is Blend of java +‎ mocha, but 1) this doesnt explain the meaning, and 2) "jamoke" doesnt mean coffee, at least not today, and it seems that that meaning didnt last long. So maybe the Italian connection is true even if my understanding of it was wrong. a dictionary of slang at least claims that it originated in Italian-American speech, from a dialect that often drops final vowels, and that the original word was giamope.

turvy

What was the Old English word for pinecone? Or, for that matter, proto-Germanic? Is it related to the turve in topsy-turvy? Is this in turn related to turf? Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/derbʰ- shows grass-related meanings coming from a PIE root meaning "turn, twist", in both Indic and Germanic, without explanation of the sense evolution.

ker-SPLASH

20:57, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

earlier i typed up an explanation on how ker- might be related to Germanic ge-. i dont believe in my own theory, but i also question the explanation we currently give, which relies on Gaelic /k/ matching Germanic /k/ at the beginning of a word.

• galore may have influenced these words (unlijkely though)

video games and tv

old diff or scrpad

• shadow realm

other related etymology questions

This is in a sense the unsorted list of the unsorted list .... i assign questions listed here an even lower probability of ever being solved, but still want to remember them.

• Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/negʷ- has English naked and all its Germanic cognates descending from what looks like an active participle, such that we might expect reflexes to include English *naking and a German word something like *nackend, rather than descending from a passive particple. see Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/-ōdaz for a possible explanation (but only possible, because the vowel still doesnt match).
• Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/blautaz, the word that means "naked, soft, vulnerable", is listed as deriving from a PIE word containing /a/, even though there are no non-Germanic cognates listed.
• Țîncu ... is it really from țânc (“toddler”) or from some other meaning of that word?
• sappinus not cognate to sap?
• popinac sounds like a Native American loanword, but is apparently just Greco-Latin. Given its etymology and that it's a flower, it's tempting to assume influence from poppy here, but tree flowers are so different in appearance from freestanding flowers that I suspect it's unrelated. Popinac might "sound Mexican" or perhaps Algonquian or Muskogee and therefore became popular^lol? in the United States for this new plant.

apparently unrelated word pairs

This list is for similar-sounding words that mean related things but are not cognates. They're not really funny enough to make it into User:Soap/etymfun nor deceptive enough to merit a space on Appendix:False cognates within English. (Note the much larger category Category:False cognates and false friends involving English.) The "search" thus is in my head, for a means by which they may have influenced each other in sense.

1. planet ≠ planitia, both used in astronomy. Caloris Planitiae is a place on the planet Mercury.
2. beauty ≠ boutique ≠ bouquet ≠ basket
3. pair~parent ≠ appear~apparent
4. uterus ≠ utroba (утроба)
5. compass ≠ compassion (the latter is related to patient instead)
6. poplar ≠ popular. I dont think too many people connect these words, but I did once when looking up in a print dictionary and finding they both come from populus.