New answers tagged etymology
5
(Side note: the ancient form is κῆπος, with a circumflex.)
The standard way to approach this sort of question is to look up the words in a good etymological dictionary. If you don't have one on hand, and don't want to make a trip to the library, Wiktionary will do in a pinch; I advise against Etymonline, which is popular but presents Proto-Indo-European ...
3
The ū in Latin fūmus and spūma have different sources. The ū in spūma is from the Proto-Italic diphthong *oi̯. The Proto-Indo-European root would have had an *e or *o vowel followed by a laryngeal and then *y~*i (Michel de Vaan gives the PIE reconstructed form as *(s)poHi-nh2- or *(s)peh3i-nh2-).
5
If we are looking for a Semitic parallel to IE *h₂elbh-o- > Lat. albus a better candidate might be the Semitic word for “milk”, Arabic ḥalab, Hebrew ḥālāḇ, Aramaic ḥalḇā, conceivably a Wanderwort or a very ancient borrowing in one direction or the other.
Then, at a more speculative level, one could ask whether there is some link between Sem. ḥ-l-b “milk” ...
7
Draconis is correct, but I want to add an additional note. Latin did not "chop off" the final consonant. What really happened is that we start with the word albus, which is an adjective meaning "white", and add another adjectival suffix ending in -inus (-a, -um), to get albinus, essentially "pertaining to" or "relating to ...
6
It seems to be a coincidence.
Latin albus comes from PIE *h₂elbhos, which has a lot of descendants: Hittite alpas, Sanskrit ṛbhú, etc. So if there was a borrowing, it would have been back in the PIE stages.
There may have been contact between PIE and Proto-Semitic, but the similarity between *h₂elbhos and *L-B-N is much less striking. So I'd consider this ...
4
As Yellow Sky notes in the comments, yogh was a consonant, not a vowel. It was originally used to represent /g/; eventually certain sounds that used to be allophones of /g/ became their own phonemes (notably /j/ and /x/), and yogh is most famously used for these.
Wynd, though, doesn't have a /j/, a /x/, or any other /g/-related sound in it. The y in this ...
0
It looks like camurria comes from Tuscany and it used to mean "sickly person, basically because old". In Sicily it is now a euphemism for gonorrhea.
The first link is a reknown linguist, De Rienzo, the second one is just local news but refers to Devoto-Oli, possibly the best italian dictionary ever.
http://forum.corriere.it/scioglilingua/02-11-2010/...
1
Here was a communication gap between @Janus Bahs Jacquet and @Пилум, so to fulfill the gap, you can read those items that close to 'semantic associative convergence':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paronymic_attraction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phono-semantic_matching
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regularization_(linguistics)
Good luck!
1
This phenomenon is called 'doublets', or 'etymological twins'.
Look up more here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublet_(linguistics)
-1
Some of the confusion surrounding the translation of corona as a crown can be put to bed if we understand that corona is also a circle of light, like the holy crown or halo as depicted in the following artwork (for example):
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/AJFWZJGyvpipBN73gX8ymJ-1200-80.jpg
When we envision the circle of light surrounding a deity we ...
Top 50 recent answers are included