The Spanish palabra (“word”) comes from the Latin parabola, meaning, “story; comparison.”
From that Latin word, we get the English… parable.
So, the word that became “word” in Spanish, became, the child’s word in English!
The p-r-b-l root is clear in both.
Interestingly, from the same root is the French word for “to talk”: parler. Je ne parle pas Francais!
But it gets more interesting: the French parler (literally, “to tell parables”) has a parallel to the Spanish hablar (which came from fabulare, literally, “to tell fables.”) As the Roman soldiers conquered Spain and France, their exaggerated words for telling stories — telling parables or fables — eventually became the words themselves for just talking.
