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Learning Spanish & Etymology Pattern-Matching for Nerds

Apoyar and Podium

The Spanish apoyar, to help, has a surprising root: podiare, the Latin meaning “to step on.” Think of the Spanish pie, from the same root.

This came about through an interesting linguistic turn of events: podiare originally meant “to step on” and then it came to mean, “to raise up” — like, to put on a podium. A podium is, after all, a raised platform that you step on!

Helping someone, in Spanish, is thus a form of lifting them up — literally. Or maybe, stepping on them?

This implies a question: what happened to the -d-? The p-y of apoyar maps to the p-d of podium, but how did the -d- turn into a -y-? The answer is that apoyar entered Spanish, from podiare, via Italian — it first turned into appoggiare, the Italian for the same! So, the -d- turned into a -g- which turned into a -y-.

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