I wasn’t sure where to put this particular post, but I enjoy what I call “light bulb” moments. Such as discovering the word aguacate and understand why the sauce is called guacamole. Or that Baumwolle literally translates to “tree wool”. And why it’s a sombrero, as it creates shade(sombre). Another thing is the word “dress” in other languages, how they tend to be a shortened version of a word for clothing, i.e. das Kleid, die Kleidung, and that we(English speakers) call it a dress, a shortened version of getting dressed. I have a number of other examples, but these will do for now.
Does anyone else enjoy these little discoveries? If you do, what are your favorite examples?
Persian is littered with derivatives like this. I find myself using or hearing words and phrases for some time, then one day the “light bulb” flashes and I’m like “Ohhhhhh, I get it now!” and laugh to myself. Ha!
It’s funny, I had a different idea of a “light bulb moment”, for me, meaning that I understood a grammar concept while practicing my speaking or studying, but words can count too.
One silly one for me was to see that in many languages, the word for “pineapple” is “ananas”, except English, of course, and a few other languages.
I enjoy all kinds of those moments. When something suddenly makes sense and you get that feeling of having something “click”. It can be in grammar as well. I find grammar moments in comparing other languages and seeing how similar or different their grammar and syntax is to one another. Especially, since my native language is American English.
It kind of happened to me with the korean word “손목 시계” (wrist watch) I remember laughing a lot when I realize that it was like a mashup of the words for hand (손) neck (목) and watch (시계)
P.S. My native language is Spanish so our word for “wrist” is “muñeca” which has nothing to do with “neck”
In English, if you get hurt a little (like you burn your finger on a hot plate), you say “Smarts!” It sounds like “Schmerz”, which means ‘pain’ in German. Not sure if that’s really why people say “Smarts”, but I can’t think of any other reason why.
I will have to look into that. I know that the phrase “it smarts” means “it hurts”, but I couldn’t tell you why. There may be a connection to the German “Schmerz”. Like an anglicized version.
When I started learning Greek, I was so excited because then, a lot of English words made more sense to me.
For example, “poly” in Greek means “a lot”, and I already knew some English words such as “polyglot” and “polyethylene”.
Also numbers. Eight in Greek is “okto”, and It reminded me of “octopus”. Ten is “deka”, and I believe it’s something to do with “decade”. Come to think of it, these numbers sound similar in other languages like Spanish and French too.
I’ve always enjoyed finding the meaning of Chinese characters in their radicals and the shared radicals in different characters that have some connection in their meaning. But there were always some that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. One day I found out about phonetic components of the characters that had no semantic value whatsoever, and suddenly a whole lot of characters made much more sense!
This is true “…in many languages, the word for “pineapple” is “ananas”,…”, for instance, in Tok Pisin (TP). Another word for pineapple in TP is “painapol”, derived from English. In Bahasa Indonesia, pineapple is called “nenas”.
Once I looked in the dictionary for “sierra” and saw that in Spanish it meant both mountain range, and also the tool saw. I could picture in my head a mountain range might look as jagged as a saw, so it made a lot of sense. I thought that was amazing, though I have not checked the etymology to know how accurate this connection is.
Now the Spanish ´sierra´ made me think about the Nordics: skera, skære, skjære, skära - all of these means ´to cut´, in Icelandic/Faroese, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish respectively
I had some similar moments, but connected with grammar. I never actually checked well those grammar boxes of Spanish past tenses. I mean those “hablé, hablaste, habló… and hablaba, hablabas, hablaba…” I was just constantly listening to them directly in speech and so I was slowly learning them by context and conversation. But last week I decided to check these schematic “boxes” and I found out, that Indicativo pretérito imperfecto has 2 forms. I am used to Italian, so I was expecting Spanish to have the same system of imperfecto (parlavo, parlavi, parlava, parlavamo, parlavate, parlavano … but also credevo, credevi, credeva, credevamo, credevate, credevano and uscivo, uscivi, usciva, uscivamo, uscivate, uscivano). So all these months I was super convinced that Spanish had 1 more past tense than Italian as I was always hearing “paseaba” but also “conocía”. I absolutely didn’t know that it was the same tense. Since this discovery I feel more comfortable with Spanish
Oh yes I enjoy those moments very much. But they’re not just words for me, they can be all sorts of things.
I remember one moment in particular when I had just started studying Arabic and had a hard time remembering ANY vocabulary … And one day I was sitting in my neighbors garden, chatting and drinking coffee and suddenly my mind would come up with قهوة ! Which is the Arabic word for coffee!! And I started giggling and noone understood what was so funny about remembering the word for coffee, but for me it made my day!
And also, more recently, I was so happy when I realized I had just written a whole chapter’s resume of my French graded learner’s book without looking up a single word! It just showed me that finally I was improving again
