Maybe you were just deliberately baiting for this, but no!
Helicopter’s etymology actually breaks down into helico and pter. Helico being cognate with helix, and pter being “flying”, from the same root as pterodactyl (flying finger).
nah there’s no “wrong” for a common native pronunciation. but for silent p- words specifically, the /pt/ and /ps/ consonant clusters just don’t occur at the start of words in English. so the p goes silent in those words. pterodactyl, psychology. but in languages like Greek and German they do occur!
Take the Russian word for “water,” essential for survival and comfort, and convert it to the diminutive case, indicating something even more precious to you than life itself.
Not a specific word, but it’s fascinating to me how, because of the Norman invasion in 1066, fancier words are of French origin and lower-class words are Germanic. So the animal is a cow, but we eat beef (boeuf) and the animal is a pig, but we eat pork (porc). Chicken was something even the poor ate, so it didn’t change.
There are other funny things going on in animal names.
A “chicken” is a young “cock”, just as a “kitten” is a young “cat”.
And a “rabbit” was a young “coney” — which rhymes with “honey”.
But folks got prudish and they didn’t want to talk about cocks and coneys in front of the kids, so words like “chicken” and “rabbit” took over.
Meanwhile over at the pig farm, how does a farmer call a hog?
They holler “Soo-ee!”, right?
They’re speaking Latin. That’s “Sui!” — the vocative form of “sus”, Latin for pig. Folks have been talking to their pigs in Latin for a long, long time.
Gotta love cacaphony. I never thought about it until I learned the word euphony, which means “good sounding” from the Greek eu (good) and phone (sound).
You can see where this is going, right?
So the Greek kakos means bad, but is cognate with the Latin cacere (to defecate), the word from which we get the informal –if slightly outdated– euphemism “caca” for shit, crap, doodoo.
So cacaphony, sure, means “bad sounding” but also in a very real sense means “sounds like shit”.
As a bonus, when I was learning Latin, I was delighted to discover the names Miranda and Amanda mean respectively, literally, good lookin’ and good lovin’.
Not a single word but equestrian and horse being closely related and both decended from krsos (if you say it out loud you can hear the similar to both horse and latin equs)
One which you won’t be able to unlearn:
“Kid” as a word for a child derives from a word “kid” which meant young goat. We’re literally calling human children “goat children” and it’s not even mocking.
The same thing happened in Swedish, the common word meaning “boy” or “guy” - “kille” is a shortened “killing” - young goat.
Etymology is fascinating. My dad had the full version of the OED when I was a kid (compressed down so that 4 pages fit on 1 page in the volume, but it was still in 2 volumes plus a supplement). I loved it. I looked up the history of words I didn’t know all the time.
I have a circle of friends that LOVE this. It kinda gets annoying when literally every conversation turns into a discussion on linguistics. It was interesting at first, but too much of a good thing and all that.
Etymology is interesting, I agree. I also find language in general fascinating. You might consider studying some basic linguistics, either academically or via youtube. How language works is really interesting, IMHO.
I in fact have. I’ve always loved language, but it was not until college that I began studying it formally.
I started learning Lakota, Japanese, and Latin on top of my English and Spanish. And while I dropped Lakota from lack of resources and Japanese because I didn’t get along with the teacher, I stuck with the Latin and considered getting a minor in it. Just having Latin and Spanish to compare side-by-side was fascinating.
My main degree program was CS, though, and (dating myself here) the main problem in AI at the time was natural language processing, which means all of us in the AI specialization had to learn a lot about phonemes, read Noam Chomsky, and generally become linguistics nerds. That bubble burst my foury year, though, and left us scrambling for another problem in AI to study.
Since I didn’t end up using either my Latin or my linguistic modeling professionally, I rolled those interests into the hobbies of etymology and her dark cousin, the generation of neologisms.
There are moments where I look into the history of a word, and find out that it has a direct connection to PIE. For the rest of that day, I wonder what the language sounded like or what they called it
etymology
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/wrong_superhero.png
Give us your best word origin.
Not that person but I always enjoyed helicopter, because it’s broken down into helico and pter
Helico means spinning and pter means pter
Maybe you were just deliberately baiting for this, but no!
Helicopter’s etymology actually breaks down into helico and pter. Helico being cognate with helix, and pter being “flying”, from the same root as pterodactyl (flying finger).
Super interesting.
Does that mean that we’re pronouncing either helicopter or pterodactyl wrong? We don’t say the ‘pter’ parts the same way I think?
Depends on whether the o is before the p or after the r.
nah there’s no “wrong” for a common native pronunciation. but for silent p- words specifically, the /pt/ and /ps/ consonant clusters just don’t occur at the start of words in English. so the p goes silent in those words. pterodactyl, psychology. but in languages like Greek and German they do occur!
Great, and now I want a heliodactyl.
etymology jokes on Lemmy… ive Waited for this day for so long
I thought heli is more like a screw. (Not claiming that it is, but that was my understanding)
The word is not “heli” though. It’s “helico”.
Like in the helicoprion (a shark with a spiral think on it’s mouth) or a helicograph (a tool to draw spirals).
Or, y’know, a helix.
Yes, that is where it comes from.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/helico
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/helico-
Doesn’t change the fact that the word helicopter splits into “helico” and “pter” with the later meaning wing or feather in greek.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pter-
It’s a helico-pter “spiraling wing”, not a heli-copter.
TIL
The dictionary definition is “Anything twisted, winding, or spiral.” but an inference can be made
What about “ligma”?
Vodka.
Take the Russian word for “water,” essential for survival and comfort, and convert it to the diminutive case, indicating something even more precious to you than life itself.
Words always mean things.
Whiskey is similar. It comes from the Gaelic uisge beatha which means water of life.
Water is the main ingredient of vodka.
That’s why you can drink as much as you want and stay hydrated.
More over, the other ingredient provides calories. Sugar and fat free!
Not a specific word, but it’s fascinating to me how, because of the Norman invasion in 1066, fancier words are of French origin and lower-class words are Germanic. So the animal is a cow, but we eat beef (boeuf) and the animal is a pig, but we eat pork (porc). Chicken was something even the poor ate, so it didn’t change.
“Poultry” though
Good point, I forgot about that.
There are other funny things going on in animal names.
A “chicken” is a young “cock”, just as a “kitten” is a young “cat”.
And a “rabbit” was a young “coney” — which rhymes with “honey”.
But folks got prudish and they didn’t want to talk about cocks and coneys in front of the kids, so words like “chicken” and “rabbit” took over.
Meanwhile over at the pig farm, how does a farmer call a hog?
They holler “Soo-ee!”, right?
They’re speaking Latin. That’s “Sui!” — the vocative form of “sus”, Latin for pig. Folks have been talking to their pigs in Latin for a long, long time.
Everywhere I go, I see his face…
ඞ
holy shit would you look at that
So a bunny rabbit is a bunny coney?
Gotta love cacaphony. I never thought about it until I learned the word euphony, which means “good sounding” from the Greek eu (good) and phone (sound).
You can see where this is going, right?
So the Greek kakos means bad, but is cognate with the Latin cacere (to defecate), the word from which we get the informal –if slightly outdated– euphemism “caca” for shit, crap, doodoo.
So cacaphony, sure, means “bad sounding” but also in a very real sense means “sounds like shit”.
As a bonus, when I was learning Latin, I was delighted to discover the names Miranda and Amanda mean respectively, literally, good lookin’ and good lovin’.
Not a single word but equestrian and horse being closely related and both decended from krsos (if you say it out loud you can hear the similar to both horse and latin equs)
One which you won’t be able to unlearn: “Kid” as a word for a child derives from a word “kid” which meant young goat. We’re literally calling human children “goat children” and it’s not even mocking.
The same thing happened in Swedish, the common word meaning “boy” or “guy” - “kille” is a shortened “killing” - young goat.
Etymology is fascinating. My dad had the full version of the OED when I was a kid (compressed down so that 4 pages fit on 1 page in the volume, but it was still in 2 volumes plus a supplement). I loved it. I looked up the history of words I didn’t know all the time.
I have a circle of friends that LOVE this. It kinda gets annoying when literally every conversation turns into a discussion on linguistics. It was interesting at first, but too much of a good thing and all that.
Etymology is interesting, I agree. I also find language in general fascinating. You might consider studying some basic linguistics, either academically or via youtube. How language works is really interesting, IMHO.
I in fact have. I’ve always loved language, but it was not until college that I began studying it formally.
I started learning Lakota, Japanese, and Latin on top of my English and Spanish. And while I dropped Lakota from lack of resources and Japanese because I didn’t get along with the teacher, I stuck with the Latin and considered getting a minor in it. Just having Latin and Spanish to compare side-by-side was fascinating.
My main degree program was CS, though, and (dating myself here) the main problem in AI at the time was natural language processing, which means all of us in the AI specialization had to learn a lot about phonemes, read Noam Chomsky, and generally become linguistics nerds. That bubble burst my foury year, though, and left us scrambling for another problem in AI to study.
Since I didn’t end up using either my Latin or my linguistic modeling professionally, I rolled those interests into the hobbies of etymology and her dark cousin, the generation of neologisms.
Ngl, I had to look up what neologism meant, but now I know that it = new words, expressions or usages.
It fascinates me how fast language is changing. When I was young verse was never used as a verb, as in “today we are versing another team”.
Or the word “meme” has completely changed meaning in less than two decades. It’s like watch evolution on fast-forward.
Verbing nouns is like rizzing language.
There are moments where I look into the history of a word, and find out that it has a direct connection to PIE. For the rest of that day, I wonder what the language sounded like or what they called it