Mientras (Spanish for “while”), comes from the Latin dum interim, meaning, “in the meantime,” which itself comes from the earlier basic prefix, inter-. Interim has entered formal English speech meaning the same, of course.
The n-t-r root is visible in both mientras and interim — but it is less obvious because of the m– opening sound, from the lost prefix dum (“out of”).
Salir, the common Spanish word meaning, “to leave” sounds like it has nothing to do with anything. Or does it?
Salir comes from the Latin salire meaning the same, “to jump”. Surprise, surprise.
From this same Latin root was get a bunch of fun English words, including:
We also get another Spanish word from the same root: saltar (“to jump”). You can see the s-l mapping across all descendants of the word!
Sacudir, Spanish for “to shake” comes from the Latin for the same, quatere.
From that same root, we get a bunch of English –cussion words, including:
You can see the s-c in reverse in the Spanish sacudir and the –cussion words.
Entender (Spanish for, “to understand”; and much more common than the other word for the same, comprender) comes from the Latin tendere, “to stretch out.”
From this root, we get the English extend — which is just a form of stretching.
We can also see how stretching became understanding if we remember that, to really understand something, you need to stretch your brain and creativity to the limits.
The t-n-d root is clear in both words as well. From the same root, we get other similar words that are metaphors for stretching out: intend, to tender, and even tentative
Enojar, Spanish for “to get angry”, has a fun cousin in the English word, “annoy”.
Both of these (along with the French for “worldly boredom”, ennui) come from the Latin inodiare, meaning, “to hate”. The Latin in- adds emphasis to the odium, Latin for “hate”.
We can see the parallels in all with the open vowel, followed by the -n-, followed by a -y- sound, although in Spanish the -y- sounds (and its corresponding -x- and -sh- variations) often turned into the -j- sounds, as it did here. Thus, the a-n-y maps to the e-n-j.
Hatred, then, dissipates and weakens over time. In English, hatred weakens into mere annoyance. In Spanish, hatred weakens into just anger, enojo. And, best of all, hatred in French weakens into a world-weary boredom of ennui.
The Spanish lavar (“to wash”) comes from the almost-identical Latin, lavare.
From the same Latin root, we get the English… deluge. What is a deluge of, well, anything if not a flood of it?
Of course, this also means that the English antediluvian (literally, “before the flood”!) also comes from the same root!
We can see the parallel more clearly if we note that the l-v root of the Spanish lavar maps to the (d)-l-u of deluge, with the -u- turning into its cousin -u- during the process.
Feliz (Spanish for “happiness”) comes from the Latin felix, meaning both “happy” and “fertile”.
It is indeed curious how, linguistically, happiness and having children and plentiful crops are deeply intertwined.
From the same root, we get the English felicity, which we can see in the f-l-z to f-l-c mapping very clearly.
Most distantly, we also have the English fecund and fetus.
The Spanish levantar –“to rise” (in all senses: to rise in the morning when you wake up, the sun rises, etc) — sounds pretty random. Nothing to do with rising up, right?
It turns out to be from the Latin root levare, from which we get a whole host of words that, in different senses, imply the same. These include:
The Spanish martillo (“hammer”) comes from the Latin malleus meaning the same. And from this Latin root malleus we get the English… malleable. So something that is malleable, changeable, is figuratively… hammerable.
We see that the Spanish m-rt-ll maps to the English m-ll.
Every English speaker knows the Spanish word for the big Mexican hats, sombrero. This word makes it easy to remember the word from whence it came: sombra, the Spanish word meaning… shade. The s-mb-r root is clear in both words!
For those of us, including me, who love less common words, another cousin word is the English penumbra, for something that’s partially covered by a shadow. The umbra is from the Latin for “shadow”, from which we also got sombra in Spanish, with the sub– prefix.
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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