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Learning Spanish & Etymology Pattern-Matching for Nerds

Guapo and Vapid

Guapo (Spanish for “beautiful,” at least in Spanish outside of Argentina) comes from the Latin vappa which meant, “flavorless wine.” (The Romans must have drunk a lot in order to have a word that just means wine that has no flavor!).

From that same Latin root vappa, we get the modern English word… vapid. A vapid thought is, after all, flavorless.

Although only the -p- root remains in both words, we can see how the -v- sound transformed into the -g- sound (both are similar), while it remained intact in the English vapid.

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