2648: sondern, sunder, & sine Mar 18, 2022
The German for 'especially' is 'besonders', and more commonly as the preposition meaning 'but rather; except is 'sondern'. The basic root also is used for compound-nouns to mean 'private'. This is related to the English 'sunder' meaning 'to separate' but in Old English the word also meant 'special; particular'. Still, lots of Indo-European languages have words with this root that mean 'only' or 'without' like the Latin 'sine' and all its derivatives like French 'sans' and Portuguese 'sim'.
2647: Nubō as a (Generally) Female Verb Mar 17, 2022
The word 'nuptial' comes from a verb in Latin that denotes wedding but specifically refers to a woman taking a husband. For instance, the each spouse would use different verbs to describe the wedding, such as:
A woman saying "virō nūbō" (I marry a man)
A man would say "dūcō uxōrem" (I marry a woman), though typically 'dūcere' means 'to lead', and 'nubō' can also be related to veiling, as a woman would do at a wedding.
This dichotomy maybe influenced its descendants like 'nubile' to also be specifically feminine.
2646: nuptial Mar 16, 2022
The word nuptial meaning 'of wedding' has a fairly simple etymology, from the Latin 'nuptialis', literally 'of a wedding'. Beyond that, things are more complicated, since it is unclear the exact root, and what it would be related to, though it is probably from the Proto-Indo-European root *sneubh- meaning "to wed". An early theory put this as a cognate with the Latin 'obnubere' (to veil) from 'nubes' (cloud) but this has been rejected. It may also be related to the word 'nymph' (in Greek νύμφη) which means 'bride' or indeed the mythical nymph, but this is also not certain. It is definitely related to 'nubile; nubility', which denotes a marriageable woman.
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'.
2644: The Cut of His Jib Mar 14, 2022
The phrase "the cut of one's jib" is a strange one, because few people actually know what a jib is. The specific etymology of the word jib is not clear, but for the purposes of the phrase it refers to a particular type of triangular sail on the front of a ship. These were standard among various navies in different ships, so knowing the shape and rigging of the jib would be a quick indication of which vessel and which type of vessel it was. This meaning was applied to people in the 19th century, with the same idea of judging one's face and overall appearance, possibly especially one's nose.
2643: maverick Mar 13, 2022
A maverick now probably refers to someone who is unconventional and individualistic, but the more traditional definition is an unbranded calf. That said, the word is fairly new, coming from a Texan cattle rancher Samuel Maverick who was known for not branding his calves. The term was used since the mid 19th century but popularized by his grandson in the 1930's, representative Maury Maverick, who served in the US congress.
2642: The Village of Å: Places with Only One Letter Mar 12, 2022
A town in Wales changed its name to have the longest place-name in Europe , but there are many places vying for the spot as the shortest. The French township of Y, over a dozen villages across Norway and Sweden each called Å meaning 'brook', as well as Ö in Sweden meaning 'island'. There are a number of other place names or names of geographic features, especially rivers, with only one letter, each of which is a vowel, though none of these are major settlements and one does have to stretch the definition of a place name in some cases to include them. It is certainly rare.
2641: Derivatives of Latin Plumbum (Lead) Mar 11, 2022
The Latin name for the metal lead is plumbum, hence the symbol on the periodic table of Pb. This word is borrowed from another pre-Indo-European language in the Italian peninsula like Etruscan. It is also where numerous other words and expressions come from in English. For instance, the word 'plummet' as in 'fall straight down', and pipes, even in Ancient Rome were often lead hence 'plummer'. More obviously like 'plumb' meaning 'straight' (e.g. "it hit him plumb in the jab"), or the stance of the batsman's legs in front of the wicket in cricket, since lead at the end of a plumb-line was used to keep a rope taut when held straight up. As a result of the meaning of 'straight', it also means 'truly; plainly' as in "the fish plumb swam away".
2640: douglas Mar 10, 2022
The name Douglas is a common last name and first name, which is a typical development of many Celtic surnames. It is, somewhat surprisingly at first glance, related to 'Dublin', and probably doesn't sound very nice either given its meaning in Scots Gaelic (dubh glas) is 'black/dark stream', but this is almost certainly just a topographical description of some marshy area of Scotland.
2639: Ladino Use for Solitario (Extra Hebrew Diacritics) Mar 9, 2022
Solitario and Rashi script uses diacritics for sounds not represented in a script normally intended for Hebrew. This is also the case in modern Hebrew writing, but not as much in Yiddish, which used digraphs etc., possible inspired by German which has many of the same. Presently, Hebrew only has one digraph, which is נג <ng> like it is found in English, German, and Yiddish for the [ŋ] sound. In Solitario used for Ladino, this was not the convention, and diacritics were added to letters. For instance, the [dʒ] sound in the word 'Jump' or 'Giraffe' is written ג׳ or גﬞ from the basic ג [g], but in Yiddish this is written -דזש <dzsh>. The only similarity between Ladino and Yiddish conventions when it comes to non-Hebrew sounds is that Yiddish also used פֿ to represent [f] as opposed to [p].
Overall, not including the ones used in Biblical Hebrew (of which there would be an additional 5), Solitario used the added forms:
זﬞ for [ʒ] (like 'viSion' or French 'Je')
טﬞ for [θ] as in 'THree'
גﬞ for [dʒ] as in Jump
2638: Solitario Script Mar 8, 2022
For all Hebrew handwriting, it does not look like printed Hebrew exactly but uses its own modern semi cursive handwriting. Like Rashi script, Solitario was a Sephardic semi cursive font used for Spanish, Ladino, and Arabic around the Mediterranean. Unlike the Ashkenazi script which grew out of it in many ways, there are more ligatures (i.e. letters joined together), and there were more diacritics used for sounds not represented in a script normally intended for Hebrew. It is also the ancestor of the modern Israeli Hebrew script, though one could not read Solitario immediately if he only knew modern Hebrew cursive.
2637: Rashi Script Mar 7, 2022
Rashi, perhaps the most famous Jewish biblical commentator, is known for being printed in a font called Rashi script, though he did not write in it himself. For one thing, it was used about four centuries after he wrote, and it is a Sephardic semi-cursive script; Rashi was not Sephardic. A tradition developed where all primary scriptural texts were written in traditional Hebrew block-letters, and all secondary texts like commentaries were in script font. This was eventually standardized into Rashi script, which is still used for many commentaries and translations.
2636: ernten, earn, אַרן Mar 6, 2022
Though the closest language to German is Yiddish, there are many Yiddish words of Germanic origin that do not have similar meanings. For instance, the Yiddish word אַרן (arn) means 'to bother; to be annoyed', but the Modern German 'Ernte' means 'a harvest'. Both of those are also related to the English 'earn'. The root of all of these did likely mean 'harvest; reap; labor', and each word in the different languages sprung off of a different definition. The meaning was kept more literal in German while it meant 'toil' and then just 'be bothersome', whereas in English the idea of 'reaping' and perhaps even 'deserving' is what held.
2635: 'Medicine' in Ojibwe Mar 5, 2022
There are a number of phrases from Native American sources such as Ojibwe and Cree, that use 'medicine' in a way it isn't seen much otherwise to mean 'magic'. Phrases like
Medicine lodge (also known as 'sweat lodge')
Medicine dance
Medicine bag
Medicine wheel
all use this to name a few examples, and there are even a number of place-names that take from these. This is not only because of more old-fashioned views of medicine, but that the Ojibwe word in all of these examples is 'mashkiki' can mean 'medicine' but also 'grass; herbs' and 'drug' not only here but in many Algonquian languages.
2634: Regina, a.k.a. Pile-of-Bones Mar 4, 2022
The capital of Saskatchewan, Canada is called 'Regina', named after Queen Victoria, but the name used to be very different. The original name of the settlement in the 19th century was 'Pile-of-Bones', only renamed from 1882 when it was made the capital of the then-territory. This name is from the Cree 'oskana kâ-asatêki' meaning "the place where bones are piled", because this is where the local tribe would leave bison bones on the flat, arid grounds. In fact, the land is so notably barren, and only useful for laying out bones, that at the time of its settlement it was a clear conflict of interest from the Lieutenant Governor who owned a large plot of that land that became the regional capital.
2633: engage & wed Mar 3, 2022
Thematically an engagement is related to a wedding, one following the other, but the words are linked as well. The word 'wed' from Old English 'weddian' meant 'to pledge', and in many other Germanic languages it denotes betting. It's from the same root as 'wage' which can mean 'pledge' in the sense of commiting to an obligation (to wage war; worker's wages) or committing to a bet (a.k.a. 'wager'). Often a W and G will morphe one to the other, and in Romance languages where 'gage' or more popularly 'engage' were adopted into English from that same root too.
2632: free & friend Mar 2, 2022
Though it's doubtful anyone in the free-love movement would have been aware of it, the word 'free' used to convey a meaning of love. The Old English for 'free' (frēo) is from the Proto-Germanic *frijaz which meant both 'beloved' but also 'unbound', as in literally not enslaved. This is related to 'friend' as well, & in many languages like German, the word for 'friend' and 'lover' are the same one, here 'Freund'.
2631: Names from (Ancient) Latin Regions Mar 1, 2022
There are lots of sources of names, whether those will be from religion, animals, plants, or just qualities. Place-names as given-names is common now with newer locations, but we have at least two names from pre-Roman Italic tribes that are names still. The feminine 'Sabine' which is very popular especially in Western Europe is the name of a tribe that lived in Latium, north west of Rome. Likewise, 'Lucas; Luke' is commonly misunderstood to come directly from the Latin word for 'light' (lux, lucas), and that is somewhat true but it comes from a word meaning "man from Lucania". That was an Oscan-Samnium tribe, though the meaning of that group's name is probably from light, as is was in the east of the peninsula, though even this is not certain and it is possible the name was for woods, rather than light at all.
2631: Demetrius, Demi, & Demeter Feb 28, 2022
There are a number of names, like Demi, Demitri, or Dimitri to identify a few, all come from the same source. These are all based from the Greek harvest deity Δημήτριος (Dēmḗtrios), latinized Demeterius, but as some of you will notice, this name is masculine. Unlike other names like 'Martin' (from 'Mars'), this is because the name refers to a (male) devotee of Demeter, not naming after Demeter herself. Demi, which is traditionally a feminine name, is from Demetria, the same word but for a female follower of the deity.
2630: Obscure Root of Litera Feb 27, 2022
As mentioned, the root of the Latin 'littera', and from it a plethora of words like 'literature', 'literal', 'letter', 'obliterate' even the Finnish word 'littera' meaning 'internationalism' and '[banknote] denomination', all come from this root. The trouble is, past this, the etymology is disputed. Some suggest it is from an earlier word 'lītera', though this form did not even clearly exist. If so, it would have come from a normal vowel lengthening process of 'litus' or a reconstructed Old Latin *leitos, and would have been related to 'linō' meaning 'smear'.
The other prominent idea is that this is from an Etruscan root, which itself is then related to the Ancient Greek διφθέρᾱ (diphthérā) meaning 'writing material', but given as Greek and Etruscan are not related to each other, and would not have such a common source, this link seems tenuous. It could be both, with each word having a certain amount of influence on the final result.