The Spanish morder, “to bite”, sounds completely different than anything in English (except for obscure SAT words like mordant – which literally means, biting!).
But who would’ve thunk that it’s related to remorse.
Remorse comes from the Latin remordere, which means, “to bite back” – from the earlier re- (the prefix meaning “back” in this case) and mordere, from which we get, morder.
The remorseful do bite back indeed!
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
