2809: Squirrelly Cognates Aug 29, 2024

Etymologies are not always as obvious as they appear. For instance, the word for ‘squirrel’ is écureuil, pronounced [e.ky.ʁœj], a cognate with English but not a cognate with the far more similar looking Swedish ‘ekorre’ of the same meaning. In order to understand this, it is important to see how French words evolve, phonetically, from their Latin origins. 

The Latin 'sciurus'—from Greek meaning “shadow tail”—or really the Vulgar Latin *scūriolus is where ‘squirrel’ and ‘écureuil’ both originate. In the case of English, the change is pretty clear, changing the spelling slightly, losing the Latin -us suffix and keeping the diminutive -l suffix. In French, the process was also regular, if you know what to look for. Any word that begins S+consonant lost the S and added É, for instance Latin ‘schola’ (school) became école.

Most Germanic languages including Swedish have words like (Norwegian) ekorn, (Icelandic) íkorni and (German) Eichhörnchen which is from a root related to the Old English ‘acol’ meaning ‘freightful’. The German word looks as such because it added a diminutive suffix -chen.