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Learning Spanish & Etymology Pattern-Matching for Nerds

Ácaro and Scar

A Spanish word that hopefully you don’t use much but unfortunately sometimes you must is ácaro, meaning, “mite.”

Ácaro comes from the Latin for the same, acarus which ultimately comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *(s)ker-, which meant “cut.” Perhaps the word for “cut” turned into “mite” because that’s what mites do, they cut you open?

From that same root, via German, English gets a bunch of words related to cutting, such as… scar. That’s just a big cut, right? We also get the English shore – that’s just where the land cuts the flow of the ocean.

We can see the c-r mapping in both languages, with the initial s- disappearing in Spanish.

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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For Nerds Learning Spanish via Etymologies