Search Results

Being a native speaker of Ukrainian which is very close to Slovak, and taking into account that the surnames like that (Баб'як [bab'jak], Бабяк [ba'bʲak]) are common in Ukraine too, I can explain the …

The Slavic k cannot correspond to the Germanic k due to the Grimm's law, Slavic kr corresponds to the Germanic hr, e. g.: Rus. krug 'circle' : Angl.-Sax. hring 'ring' Rus. krov' 'blood' : Old Isl. h …

The English Wiki says: "The oldest roller coasters are believed to have originated from the so-called "Russian Mountains", which were specially constructed hills of ice, located especially around Sain …

The etymology of сейчас is transparent for the speakers of Russian, it is derived from сей час (this hour, this time). Теперь is not that obvious, but it also comes from a noun phrase. …

Agamemnon - Greek Ἀγαμέμνων "very steadfast". Priam is from the Luwian compound Priya-muwa-, which means "exceptionally courageous". In Greek, Héktōr is a derivative of the verb ékhein, archaic form …

Both nouns and adjectives are called 'nominal parts of speech', from Latin nomen 'noun', the Latin for 'adjective' being 'nomen adiectivum'. I guess that can be the source of the Etymonline confusion. …

Very often diminutives of personal names bear no resemblance to the original, consider the Russian Шура [ˈʃurə] which is a diminutive of Александр (Alexander), or the English Dick for Richard, or the …

In Sanskrit there are dozens and dozens of synonyms for 'sun', none of them a loanword. The same goes about other notions, too, generally speaking Sanskrit has very few loanwords, mostly names of plan …

The French word ‘noir’ means ‘black’ and it is used in the names of art genres which are characterized by their dark atmosphere. Historically, the first such genre to which ‘noir’ was applied was film …

The Latin-Romanian sound correspondences exclude any possibility for the Romanian iubi 'to love' to be a descendant of the Latin iubeō (iubēre, iussī, iussum) 'command, order'. Latin ē/oe and i became …

In Russian, one of the words for 'alphabet' is азбука (azbuka) which derives from the original old names of the two first letters of the Cyrillic alphabet, азъ for A and букы for Б. Aparently, that's …

In the Hungarian etymological dictionary I have found, Etimológiai szótár. Magyar szavak és toldalékok eredete, Zaicz Gábor, Budapest, 2006, p. 104, it is said that cápa, first attested at the end of …

It has no common meaning. Margarita is a Roman name, that word meant 'pearl' in Latin. Martin is also a Roman name, it comes from 'Mars', the name of the god of war. Maria is derived from the Hebrew n …

The ultimate origin of that word is Ancient Greek ὄπιον (ópion, "opium") which is a diminutive form of ὀπός (opós, “juice”). It was borrowed into Persian as اپیون (apiyūn) and from Persian it was borr …

It is definitely a question of trust, unless you are an author of etymological dictionaries yourself. Your language has lots of words, and you need to know the etymologes of some of them, so for each …