2472: lime & limestone Sep 18, 2021

'Lime', as in 'limestone' or just the fruit, don't have anything to do with each other. Regarding the material, this is actually related to the word 'slime', both further related to German 'schleim' (mucus), Latin 'limus' (mud) and Ancient Greek λίμνη (límnē) meaning, 'marsh'. This is later developed into words for glue—even now limestone is an ingredient in cement—and then again changed to denote the substance calcium oxide. The fruit on the other hand is from Persian لیمو‎ (līmū). This is turn is likely from the Sanskrit निम्बू (nimbū) originally meaning 'lime' but which also influenced 'lemon'.

2423: Is 'Taurus' (Bull) Semitic? Aug 9, 2021

The Latin 'taurus', Greek ταύρος (tauros) and Lithuanian 'tauras' all could come from the Proto-Indo-European PIE *tau-ro- meaning 'bull', but this could actually be Semitic. The Aramaic for 'bull' is תור (tor), in Hebrew שור (shor), and Arabic ثور (thawr) and so on throughout the whole Semitic family. Meanwhile, many Indo-European languages do not have a word descended from this root, such as in many Indo-Iranian languages, or other related languages spoken further the East. Some notably may have exceptions to this, as in Persian or Avestan with a similar word for horses, or Sanskrit sthura- (thick; standing firm) related to the Old English 'steer'. It could be that those missing cases are simply lacking data, or that this is a wanderwort.

2161: Urdu & Hindustani Nov, 14, 2020

"Is urdu a language?" is not a question I would ask at the tenser parts of the India-Pakistan border, but the answer is not immediately clear, and so worth asking. Urdu is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan, and many describe it as the Persianized form of Hindustani, but it is also recognized by the constitution of India. Through contact with the Muslim territories to the west, the Indo-Aryan language draws heavily from Persian, especially for its upper register, and is written in the Persian script. Likewise, Hindi, especially in the west around Delhi, has the same basic structure and base of vocabulary (about 99%), but draws from Sanskrit for its higher register and uses the Devanagari script. There is a significant level of mutual intelligibility between the two.