2271: Zwei...Zwene, & Zwo? Mar 5, 2021

The German word for 2, 'zwei' is not declined like a regular adjective in German. Historically, all three grammatical genders were used, including 'zwene' or 'zween' for the masculine which has entirely dropped out, and the feminine 'zwo' which is a variant sometimes used for clarity with 'drei' (three), such as in military radio transmissions. This loss of gender in cardinal numbers is not universal in German with 'eins' (one) declined normally; moreover, Luxembourgish and certain Swiss German dialects still feature variants like 'zwou' and 'zwéin' [Luxembourgish]. It does elucidate the connection to the English 'twain'—also historically the masculine form of 'twā' [feminine]—but in the case of 'twain' this was later used more broadly before certain types of words such as nouns as to disambiguate between it and 'to' or 'too', thus outlasting the general breakdown of English's grammatical gender.

2268: doubt and 2 Mar 2, 2021

Though it may not be too surprising that the word for ‘doubt’ is also related to words for ‘two’ including ‘duo’ and indeed ‘two, but keep in mind this replaced an earlier word with the same quality: Old English ‘twēo’ (doubt) from the same root as ‘two’. Likewise, the German word for doubt is ‘Zweifel’ which clearly has the root ‘zwei’ (two) in it. Moreover, the Latin root ‘dubitāre’, which led to the current English word is thought to come from habeō (I have), combined with the Proto-Indo-European *dwóh₁ “two” as in ‘holding two’ making the word seemingly even more literal, but actually the sense in Latin would be closer to ‘hesitate’.

Notably, the word ‘doubt’ in Middle English was not spelt with a B, but this was added later to correspond with the Latin root even though the Old French root, and the modern French derivative ‘douter’ (to doubt) aren’t spelt that way.