The Spanish ayudar, for “to help” is a close cousin of the English, aid. You can see that if we remember that the -y- sound is very similar to the -i- and thus the a-y-d of ayudar maps to the a-i-d of aid.
Both come from the same root: the Latin prefix ad- (“to”) and the verb juvare (“to help”). We can see the j to y transition here as well. Thus, both words are related to adjutant as well.
The Latin words that began with “cl” changed, pretty consistently, to “ll” as Latin changed into Spanish.
Today’s example of this: the Latin word for “key” was clavis. This became the modern Spanish word for “key”, llave.
There are, however, a few interesting other descendants of clavis, and thus distant relatives of llave. They include:
Let’s try not to laugh with this one.
The Spanish ending -illo is a common diminuitive, meaning a smaller version of something. A vecino is a neighbor; a vecinillo is the cute word that Flanders calls his neighbors in the Spanish translation of the Simpsons.
So: anus means anus. And anillo — the very common Spanish word meaning “ring” — is thus really just “little anus.”
Yes, in Spanish, a ring is just a small anus.
The Spanish viejo (“old”) comes from the Latin vetus meaning the same, “old.”
From the same Latin root, we get the English inveterate (an SAT word meaning, a “long-ingrained habit.”) Lets break down the English: the Latin prefix in- means, well, “in” and the “veterate” means “old”, from the same root vetus. So, an inveterate habit is really just a habit you’ve had for a long time!
We can see that the v-j root of viejo maps to the v-t of inveterate. The Latin -t- turning into the -j- sound isn’t that common (more common is that it turns into a -sh- sound, as in syrup and jarabe) but isn’t too uncommon either: we can hear the similarities between -t- and -sh- if we say the sounds together quickly!
The Spanish for “beautiful”, hermosa, seems unrelated to the English for the same. Or is it?
Hermosa comes from the Latin for “beautiful” formosus.
We can see this pattern because it is an example of the Initial F to H pattern, where many Latin words that began with F- turned into H- in Spanish.
Ahhh, that makes sense: Formosa, in Argentina really means, “Beautiful”, and this also explains the Portuguese for beautiful (also formosa) as well: Portuguese never lost that initial F.
The Latin formosus itself comes from the root forma, meaning, well, “form”. So, beauty, itself, is just your pure form. At least in Spanish.
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:
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.
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
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