Cuer­no and Cor­nu­copia

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly dis­cussed cuer­no (Span­ish for horn) and its re­lat­ed Span­ish words–and here’s an­oth­er: cor­nu­copia, which lit­er­al­ly means… the “horn of plen­ty.” We see the h‑r-n map to the c‑r-n again here!

Puñal and Pu­gna­cious

The Eng­lish for ea­ger-to-fight, pu­gna­cious, con­tains the ‑gn- pat­tern in­side it: a give-away to the pat­tern that ‑gn- words in Latin turned the ‑gn- in­to a ‑ñ- in Span­ish yet re­mained the same in­to Eng­lish.

There­fore, pu­gna­cious maps per­fect­ly to puñal, the Span­ish for… “dag­ger.” It makes sense that “dag­ger” and “ea­ger to fight” come from the same root, af­ter all. And that root, in this case, is the Latin pugnare, mean­ing, “to fight.”

Asien­to, Su­per­seer and Se­date, As­sid­u­ous

Su­per­seer (Span­ish for, “to dis­con­tin­ue; cease”) comes from the Latin su­per­sedere which in term is a com­bi­na­tion of the pre­fix su­per- (“above”) and sedere (“to sit”). When you stop do­ing some­thing — you’re now, lit­er­al­ly, sit­ting on top of it. At least in Span­ish.

From the Latin sedere root, we get var­i­ous Eng­lish words re­lat­ed to sit­ting, in­clud­ing:

• Se­date — when you’re on a seda­tive, you’re just sit­ting around!
• As­sid­u­ous — this orig­i­nal­ly meant “con­stant­ly sit­ting down”, but came to mean, “very busy” (since you sit down when you work) and thus the busy peo­ple are the as­sid­u­ous ones!
• Ob­sess — with the ob- pre­fix (“against”), it’s lit­er­al­ly, “some­one sit­ting op­po­site you” — which is what you do when you’re ob­sess­ing over some­one, watch­ing their every move close­ly.
• Su­per­sede — lit­er­al­ly, “to sit on top of” — very sim­i­lar to, “go­ing over their heads!
• Seden­tary — the lifestyle of sit­ting down. Sounds fa­mil­iar!
• Siege — you sit in your cas­tle when it’s un­der siege!
• Re­side — what do you do in your res­i­dence if not, sit around?

From the same Latin root sedere we al­so get the Span­ish… asien­to, the com­mon word for, seat. Now that makes sense, does­n’t it?

The s‑n-t/d root is vis­i­ble in most of these words. Note that in su­per­seer, the mid­dle ‑n- dis­ap­peared: hence the ‑e- on both sides!

Asun­to and As­sump­tion

Asun­to (Span­ish for “sub­ject,” in the sense of, “theme”) come from the Latin for the same, as­sump­tus (“tak­en”) — from which we get the al­most iden­ti­cal Eng­lish, as­sume.

In­ter­est­ing­ly, as­sump­tion orig­i­nal­ly had a ful­ly re­li­gious con­no­ta­tion, some­thing we of­ten for­get or I some­times vague­ly re­mem­ber to­day: you’re re­ceived in­to heav­en. An as­sump­tion, in its mod­ern sense, is re­al­ly just a re­li­gious be­lief ac­tu­al­ly!

The Latin root as­sump­tus it­self comes from ad- (“up, to”) and sumere (“to take”) — so when you as­sume, you’re re­al­ly “tak­ing it up”!

The a‑s-t of asun­to maps clear­ly to the a‑ss-(m)-t of as­sump­tion.

Char­lar and Char­la­tan

Char­lar (Span­ish for “to chat”) comes from the Ital­ian cia­r­la — as does the Eng­lish… char­la­tan. We can see the ch-r‑l root in both eas­i­ly.

In­ter­est­ing­ly, the Eng­lish word has tak­en a neg­a­tive turn while the Span­ish, not so much. I would at­tribute this to the An­glo-Sax­on cul­ture’s look­ing down on­to talk with­out ac­tion, while the Latin cul­ture’s fo­cus on talk even if it means in­ac­tion.

Al­so from the same root is the Eng­lish, cha­rade. Cha­rade, like char­la­tan, con­tains the neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions of the ap­pear­ance, not re­al­i­ty.