Sentarse, Spanish for “to sit”, comes from the root *sed-, meaning the same.
The surprising English cognate is… saddle. A saddle is what you do sit in, indeed!
This mapping is not obvious at first, but you can see that the s-d root of saddle maps to the s-(n)-t of sentarse. Anglo-Saxons are shorter and to the point–as usual.
English does have another word from the same root, but it comes via the Latin and is thus more pretentious and closer to the Spanish: sedentary. A veritable SAT word!
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!
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