2645: Hittite Gender: Animate & Inanimate Mar 15, 2022

Hittite, like many Indo-European languages has two grammatical genders, though most linguistics used to refer to this not with 'masculine' and 'feminine' but as 'masculine' and 'neuter'. This might sound strange to people who have encountered a neuter in languages like Latin, German, Icelandic, or Greek, it is usually presented as a third option, but this doesn't have to be so. First of all, nothing is inherently related to human sex when it comes to grammatical gender. In the case of Hittite, the genders are now sometimes referred to as animate and inanimate, or common and neuter. Basically, one category in Hittite contains the words for male and female beings, while the other does not. That said, plenty of words exist in this masculine/animate gender that are neither living nor sexed, like 𒃾𒅖 (wiyanis) meaning 'wine'.

2590: vinyl Jan 16, 2022

The material vinyl doesn't have any grape products in it, but it is named for them. The first half of the word is from the Latin 'vinum' (wine) and the ultimate Greek ending '-yl' for υλος (hylos) meaning 'matter', used now for many groups of chemical compounds. The name in particular is from the association with ethyl alcohol, but does not have any particular relation to wine otherwise.