Coquetear, the Spanish verb meaning “to flirt,” comes from the French coq which means “cock” — in both senses — from which we also get the English word cock, albeit with a slightly different spelling.
It’s not that hard to figure out how a word that means “penis” came to mean “flirt” — but it is easy to smile every time you remember why.
From the same root, we also get the almost-forgotten English word for “flirting,” coquetry.
The c-q to c-ck mapping is clear between both words.
Semana (Spanish for “week”) comes from the Latin septimana for the same. Septimana itself comes from the Latin root septem meaning… seven. There are, after all, seven days in the week–by definition!
From the same root, we get the English September. But something isn’t right. Isn’t September the ninth month, not the seventh month? Huh?
The fascinating explanation is that the ancient calendar had ten months, the first of which is… March. So, the numbering is all two behind. This explains not only why September is two off, but so is October (from the root oct- meaning “eight”, not “ten”) as well as November (nov– for “nine”, not “eleven”) and December (dec– for “ten”, not “twelve.”)
Perejil and its English version parsley sound very different. But they are, actually, etymologically the same word.
They sound different because often the -s- and -sh- sounds in Spanish turned into the letter -j- with the Arabic throat-clearing sound as a pronunciation. Thus, the p-r-j-l of perejil maps exactly to the p-r-s-l of parsley.
A “shooting star” in Spanish is an estrella fugaz. Since estrella means “star”, then fugaz is the parallel to “shooting.”
Fugaz comes from the Latin fugere which means, “to run away; flee” — from which we get the English fugitive.
The mapping is obvious with the f-g retained in both versions.
Thus, in Spanish, a shooting star is literally, a fleeing star. But fleeing from what?
The Spanish correr, “to run,” comes from the Latin for the same: currere.
In a “It’s not obvious until you realize it, then it’s completely obvious moment!”, this is related to the English: current.
Although current obviously does not share the same literal meaning of running, conceptually it is very similar: what is happening right now is what is running or flowing by.
So time doesn’t fly; it flows past, right now — literally.
Not to mention, think of the way they always talk about electricity: the running current.
Huevo (Spanish for “egg”) comes from the Latin ovum for the same. From that Latin root, we get the English… ovaries. The ue-v of huevo clearly maps to the o-v of ovary! The eggs are both literal and metaphorical!
From the same root we also get ovulate and even… oval An egg is oval, isn’t it?
The Spanish involucrar (“to get involved with”) comes from the Celtic voloper (“to wrap up.”) Isn’t getting “involved” with something just getting yourself wrapped up in it?
From that same Celtic root, we also get the English… envelope. An
We can see the i-n-v-l of involucrar maps to the e-n-v-l of envelope.
The Spanish hechizo (“spell”; nothing to do with the letters in words, but what a witch casts on you!) comes from the Latin facticius (“made by art”; “artificial”—indeed, that which is artificial is just something not occurring naturally, but instead made by art!)
But how did “artificial” change to mean “spell”? Think about it this way: casting a spell goes against nature—it’s what the wicked, crazy and profoundly unnatural woman does! Think of the three weird sisters in Macbeth, and how they unnaturally stir up all the elements!
From hechizo (more specifically, from its Portuguese twin cognate, feitiço), we get the English “fetish”. How? Well, you have a fetish when the recipient casts a spell on you to become obsessed with the object of your fetish, right? Enough said!
That root facticius turned into hechizo by changing via two common patterns: the initial “f” in Latin tended to turn into an “h”, as Latin turned into Spanish (compare fig and higo, or fume and humo!), and the -ct- tended to change to a -ch- (compare noche and nocturnal; or ocho and octagon). Thus the h-ch of hechizo maps to the f-sh of “fetish”.
Hervir (Spanish for, “to boil”) comes from the Latin fervere (“to be hot, burn, boil”).
The best part: from this same root, we also get the English… fever!
Thus, this is another example of the pattern where Spanish lost the initial F and replaced it with the (unspoken) “H”: Hoja-Foliage, Huir-Fugitive, etc.
Atropellar (“to knock over, to knock down” in Spanish) comes to Spanish borrowed from the French, troupe, as in, a troop of soldiers or more common these days, a comedy troop.
Although we can see the tr-p root in the English, French, and Spanish words, the question remains: how did a group turn into a knocking-over? The answer is that, large groups of rowdy drunk men almost always result in… knocking lots of people over! This is not a new concept–the word itself attests to the antiquity of drunken revelry!
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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