The Spanish Acatar (meaning “to follow, obey, respect”) comes from the Latin captare, meaning “to capture, take hold of”. From that root, we get a few English words, including:

• Capture — surprise, surprise.
• Capable — if you’re capable, you take hold of the solutions!
• Captive — if you’re captive, someone else has taken hold of you!
• Cater — the caterer is literally the person who takes hold of the food for you.

The c-(p)t root is visible in all, although the -p- in the -pt- has been lost in a few variations.

Cumplir, the common Spanish meaning, “to finish [doing something]” is — in a moment of, “ah! It’s obvious now that you’ve told me!” — a close cousin of the English, accomplish.

Both come from the Latin meaning “to complete,” accomplere, which comes from the older Latin root complere, meaning, “to fill up” — from which we also get the English complete.

Thus, the c-m-pl of cumplir maps to the c-m-pl of accomplish. Not to mention, the c-m-pl of complete as well.

The English peel comes from the Latin pilus, meaning “hair”, from which we get the Spanish for “hair,” pelo.

More interesting, however, is its Spanish cousin, piel, meaning “skin,” from the related Latin pellis, meaning “hide”.

Your skin, after all, is just a thin covering of your body — just like when you peel the skin off of an apple.

The p-l root is easily visible in all of these.

In the final of our day-of-the-week comparisons, we have Sunday.

In the Latin languages, it is domingo, or a variation of it. These all come from the Latin for God — Deus. Sunday, after all, is the traditional Christian day of prayer and worship for God. It is literally God’s Day.

In the Germanic tradition — well, in the ancient German pantheon of nature Gods, the main God was the Sun himself. Our Sunday is quite literally “sun” – “day”: the day of the sun. The parallel thus continues!

No one quite knows the origin of zapato, Spanish for “shoe.” But the same word — or words from the same root — are still used in Portuguese, French, Italian, and even Arabic and, most shocking of all, Basque (shocking since Basque is unrelated to any other known language).

Most interesting, though, is that from the old French for shoe, savate, which is from the same root as zapato as we can see with the z-p to s-v mapping, do we get the English, sabotage.

Indeed, they say sabotage comes from the word for “shoe” since French workers used to throw their (wooden) shoes into machinery in order to sabotage their factory.

Naufragar (Spanish for “to be shipwrecked”) comes from the Latin Navis meaning “boat.” From that same root we get the English… navigation and navy. The n-v root is clearly visible in all of them.