Red (Spanish for “network; net”) comes from the Latin rete, meaning “net.”
From the same root, we get the English… retina. How? What does your eye have to do with a net?
Well, if you look deeply into someone’s eye, their retina turns out to be a very tight network of blood vessels. And thus, your retina really is a… red (Spanish sense)!
You can see that the r-d of red maps to the r-t of retina.
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
