The Spanish demasiado (“enough!”) comes from the Latin adverb magis, meaning “more!”.
From that same root magis, we also get the English… master.
It goes to show you: a master is really someone who, as Depeche Mode said, just can’t get enough. So they keep going and going and going, until they’ve become a master.
The m-s root maps clearly to both words.
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
Here at ForNerds, we love meeting and talking to other people who love learning Spanish, etymologies, and any other topic in nerdy ways. Drop us a note and say hi!
morgan@westegg.com
