Rolling in Etymology

Of the remaining ten months, the first four months – March, April, May, and June – have symbolic names:

March comes from Mars, the god of war (because March was the start of the fighting season).

We don't have a single h*cking clue where April comes from. It's a very symbolic name though, that's for sure. Trust me. I know these things.

May comes from Maius, an ancient deity whom we have since forgotten. Thanks Romans, you're great at writing stuff down. JK, it was probably just something the Arabs and Persians didn't hear about, since they're the ones who really kept the knowledge until the Renaissance when Europe was like "gib culture back."

June comes from Juno, the goddess of marriage and the queen of the gods... and the sister of the king of the gods – I won't go into Roman/Greek mythology, but it suffices to say there's a LOT of incest.

So, then we have the final six months: July, August, September, October, November, and December. Or, as they used to be called, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and December. Notice anything?

Damn right, they're just given numbers – quinque, sex, septum, octō, novem, decem. Booooring. I can see why Julius and Augustus Caesar renamed the first two to match their names – July and August. Less numbers, more narcissism.

The calendar is a pretty neat thing. For starters, it's named after one of only ten Latin words that start with a K, Kalendarium! That's pretty special. (Even though it can also be spelled with a C...)

The Roman calendar, the basis for the Julian and Gregorian calendars, was only ten months long. Now you're probably thinking one of two things depending on how edgy you are: "God I wish I could have two months less every year," or "Excuse me, a year has twelve months, you dumbass." I'll... uh... explore the second one.

So, originally, the Roman calendar was only a thing during the working year – March to December. I guess that means January and February were single for a h*cking long time – they didn't have dates *badum tssss*

Anyway, I promise I'm getting to the point. But first, here's where we get the names for the two 'forgotten' months from: January is named after Janus, the two-faced Roman god of decisions. Janus symbolically looked in opposite directions, and January signifies looking back on the old year and on to the new year. This is where the Latin word ianua 'door' comes from, since it (kinda) looks both inwards and outwards! February comes from Februa which is the 'month of expiation' (making amends).

(Continued in the next post.)

I promise I'll start posting again at some point, but here's some stuff in the meantime:

Say you have the Latin collis "hill" and the English hill. You can't just go "There both have two Ls and an I, so they must be related!" because that's just stupid. What you can do, however, is realise (and prove in tandem) that many Latin words beginning with C have equivalents in English (and many Germanic languages) starting with H.

So, the English hundred-headed hound with horns is translated into Latin as canis centrum capitum cum cornibus and you can – pretty much – prove your point!

Linguistics background:
This shift is called Grimm's Law, which describes many common consonant shifts that occur in the transition from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. It also includes the P -> F shift evident in the Latin paternal pisces becoming English fatherly fish(es).

Etymological connections across languages can be hard to find, and there are plenty of obstacles along the way. For example, anyone could link Uzbek and English (chop and chop), Mayan and English (hole and hole), Korean and English (mani and many), and Nahuatl and English (huel and well).

However, just thinking about this for the shortest of moments makes it quite obvious that these words are in fact not linked: they are coincidences. Pure chance that the words are the same, because the human mouth and vocal chords (etc.) can only make a certain limited number of sounds. It's pretty much the same way you get one word (or two very similar words) meaning two entirely different things, such as in Swedish: beror "depends" and berör "affects".

Now, to link some words, you can't just go around saying "oh this Latin words looks really similar to this English word so they must be linked" or you get stuff like ordo "order" being linked to word (or in Swedish, ord "word").

You need to prove that there's a pattern.

Ok, time for something more bite-sized: the word muscle.

Muscle has a pretty straight-forward origin: it goes back to Middle French muscle, which itself is from Latin mūsculus, meaning... "small mouse". I don't quite get it either.

The funny thing is though, this comparison isn't even exclusive to Latin. The Romans actually calqued it from Greek, thinking it made perfect sense. Russian has мышца myshtsa of the same meaning, Persian has ماهیچه mâhiche "little fish", so on and so forth. For some reason a lot of Indo-European languages seem to enjoy comparing muscles to little animals.

In honour of this channel's most viewed message, I'd like to make a silly joke that makes me laugh every time:

"Try our new gourmet meal: smashed testicle on toast."

The word alcohol comes from the Arabic اَلْكُحُول‏ (al-kuḥūl, for ease "al kuhul"), which sounds ridiculous given the zero-tolerance rule of Islam. However, al kuhul didn't mean the same thing as it does now. It comes from the same root as kohl which is an extract, so al kuhul came to mean pure essence.

I have to admit, I was a little disappointed to find that I couldn't link kohl with the Proto-Germanic *kulą "coal".

Then in 1672, a smart ass decided to find the pure essence of wine. What makes wine cause you to get drunk? What is its al kuhul?

Needless to say, the pure essence of wine was discovered, and it was called wine-alcohol. By 1753, everyone had been so drunk on wine-alcohol that we dropped the wine-(bottle) and shortened it to alcohol. Tada!

Pretty much everyone loves the Alchemists because they did some weird and wacky things.

While they were weird-and-wackying away (and, might I add, failing to produce gold from metal) they would often distill a strange water-like substance that makes you drunk.

They called it aqua vitae, "water of life".

As partially said before, Scottish Gaelic translated this into uisge beatha.

The French translated this into their brandy's name, eau de vie, which reminds me of eau de toilette which — no — means getting ready water. "Toilet water" would be eau des toilettes. Get your head out of the gutter and/or toilet.

The Scandinavians... well... who needs translation? Aquavit! (or akvavit if you're Danish)

One of Norway's Aquavit brands is called Linie Aquavit, so called because it ships its produce to Australia and back (over the Equator's line). Apparently this gives it a mellow taste? I'm not sure if this makes it sound better or worse for me, as I was taught as a child "If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down."

All of this, just for things named after water.

We must go deeper.

In Proto-Indo-European, *wódr has an oblique stem, *udén-, and it is from here that we get the Proto-Celtic word *udenskyos which also means "water".

A few centuries down the road, we get to the lovely language called Scottish Gaelic (or, as my favourite typo would produce, Scottish Garlic.)

In Scottish Gaelic, the word for "water" is uisge. Does it look familar yet?

Let me just... *uisgey* change... *wisgey* some... *wiskey* letters... Whiskey!

(Frankly if you didn't get it by "wiskey" then you've gotta stop drinking it.)

"Wow!" you say. "What else is named after water?" you ask.

What a great question. Let's crack on.

Just about everyone knows that we get the word vodka from the Russian "во́дка" (vódka).

Did you know that that's the diminutive of "вода́" (vodá) which means "water"? Well... I guess that's a pretty stupid question to be asking in a channel populated by language enthusiasts and learners. Let's pretend you don't, even if you do.

Here comes the kicker: both "water" and "вода́" come from the same Proto-Indo-European word, *wódr ("water").

C'mon, it's not that surprising... they basically look the same, right?
Besides, once you're really smashed they even taste the same.

Well... I might as well...

Australia comes from the Latin "australis" with an "-ia" ending, which comes from "terra australis."

"terra australis" means "southern land" (flip the words around). I guess this makes sense since Australia is actually at the top of the world!!!

Well, that's only half sarcastic. If you orient the Earth so that Australia is in the centre, there's a circle around Australia consisting of the other continents (including Antarctica). :]

In fact, "australis" comes from "auster" meaning "south wind," which is the name of the Roman god of the South Wind!

In seriousness though I will post more stuff here. Just gotta get back into the jam with Australia and all.

One of the less-followed sports at the Olympics is the epee.

We – the ever-lazy English speakers – saw the French word épée. Like no-one else does as well as we do, we stole it, and then decided that it needed to be more English.

What did we do? We got rid of the accents, and ruined the pronunciation of it forever.

EPP-ay? EE-pee? EH-pay? EEP-ai?

Whatever. Thanks, Mr English.

Épée comes from Middle French espee, from Old French espee, which comes from the Latin spatha.

A spatha was a double-edged sword used by Roman cavalry officers, but clearly the horses got lost somewhere between 500AD and now, though. :(

Spatha is also the root for spatula, so why, Olympics Committee, is there no Olympic sport requiring spatulas?? ...spatulae?

I'd love to write about hockey but no-one knows where that comes from, except that it may come from "to hook" or "hook" (noun) since the stick looks like one.

Football goes by two names in English:
- football in British English
- soccer in American English

The neat thing about the word "soccer" is that it actually came from British English.

Both football and soccer are abbreviations of Association football.

Where football clearly comes from the second word, soccer instead comes from the first word's shortening down to soc.

Our good old friend Mr English came along and decided to chuck an -er on the end of it, so we got the word socker in 1885, soccer in 1888, and socca in 1889.

Obviously, soccer took the cake and became another word for football.

Well, here we go, in lieu of a previous message...

I had intended to send more sports. Oops.