Afinar and Refine
- Posted by Morgan
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- in True Spanish Etymology Stories
Afinar, meaning “to tune” — as in, you tune your guitar — comes from the Latin finis, meaning, “border”: tuning a guitar is really finding the exact border between this note and the other one.
From the same Latin root finis, we get English words such as fine, refine (remember the re– prefix is just an intensifier), as well as the English finish.
Tuning your guitar, in other words, really is an act of refining the sounds.
The f-n root is clearly visible in all.
- See more of this pattern: True Spanish Etymology Stories
Correr – Horse
The Spanish correr, “to run” seems completely unrelated to the English horse. Looks can be deceiving.
Correr comes from the Latin for the same, currere. Currere, in turn, comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *kurs, which also means, “to run” — just like horse does! Both have the same common ancestor.
The weird thing is: how did the PIE *kurs turn into horse, they sound so different.
The explanation is that, in the Germanic languages like English, the k- sound turned into the h- sound. But in Spanish, the original k- sound remained, although usually written with a c-.
This explains many parallel words that have c- and h- sounds that map to each other between Spanish and English, like heart/corazon and head/cabeza.
Trazar and Trace
- Posted by Morgan
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- in True Spanish Etymology Stories
The Spanish trazar (“to draw up”) comes from the Latin tractus (“drawing.”) From that same root we get a few English words, including, trace. The t-r-z to t-r-c mapping is very clear here.
What’s more interesting are the other words that come from the Latin tractus. These include:
- Trait — A trait, after all, is just an outline of your personality
- Train — Think of the word “draw,” but in the other sense: the horse draws the carriage.
- Trattoria — The Italian restaurant draws you in with its awesome food!
- Tract — When you’ve drawn out your borders over land
- Treat — When you’ve drawn what you want out of the patient
- See more of this pattern: True Spanish Etymology Stories
Empatar and Pact
- Posted by Morgan
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- in True Spanish Etymology Stories
Empatar (Spanish for “to tie” — in the sense of, both teams scoring equally) comes from the Latin pactum for, well, “pact, deal”.
The connection between teams being tied and a pact is interesting: both imply equality. A pact is a deal that both teams benefit from equally, because if they didn’t, they just wouldn’t enter into the pact! Without equality between the sides, it’s not a pact; it’s a “treaty”!
The p-t of empatar maps to the p-ct of pact, with the -ct- sound being simplified into just -t-, as often happened.
- See more of this pattern: True Spanish Etymology Stories
Autopista and Pizza
- Posted by Morgan
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- in True Spanish Etymology Stories
Autopista (Spanish for “highway”) comes from the words auto– (you can guess what that one means!) and pista, which is Spanish for “track” (think, train tracks, or the track that runners run on).
But where does pista come from? The Latin pistus (“to pound” — think of the motion of pounding something into dust as being a bit like the running around the track! Pounding the pavement!). From this Latin pistus, we get a few English words including… pizza (via Italian, of course! Think of the pounding needed to make the pizza dough!) and piston (the piston engine going in circles is a bit like running as well!).
Thus, we can see the p-st of autopista maps to the p-zz of pizza and the p-st of piston.
- See more of this pattern: True Spanish Etymology Stories
Dejar – Relax
The “sh” sound — often represented in writing as an “x” — transformed in all different ways to the “j” letter (and the accompanying mouth-clearing sound, influenced by Arabic) as late Latin turned into Spanish. See lots of examples: sherry/jerez, for example.
Here’s another: the common Spanish word, dejar, meaning, “to leave to the side” or “to put down” or to “put away” or to just “let go.”
Dejare comes from the Latin laxare, meaning, “to loosen”. From this same root, we get a few English words — which did not go through the x-to-j transformation Spanish did including:
- Lax — which basically means to loosen up, so it is similar conceptually!
- Laxative — this loosens up the remains of your food inside your body so you can excrete, to be euphemistic.
- Relax — this is a loosening of your muscles, body, and mind. According to this same pattern, we also know that relax in Spanish is, relajar.
See more examples of this same pattern including lejos and leash here.
what is the etymological way to learn spanish?
Nerds love to pattern-match, to find commonalities among everything. Our approach to learning languages revolves (the same -volve- that is in “volver”, to “return”) around connecting the Spanish words to the related English words via their common etymologies – to find the linguistic patterns, because these patterns become easy triggers to remember what words mean. Want to know more? Email us and ask:
morgan@westegg.com
patterns to help us learn spanish:
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