Learning Spanish & Etymology Pattern-Matching for Nerds
Huevo (Spanish for “egg”) comes from the Latin ovum for the same. From that Latin root, we get the English… ovaries. The ue-v of huevo clearly maps to the o-v of ovary! The eggs are both literal and metaphorical!
From the same root we also get ovulate and even… oval An egg is oval, isn’t it?
The Spanish lágrima (“tear”) comes from the Latin Lacrima, meaning the same.
From the same root we get the English… lacrimal sac. In case you forgot our high school biology class, that’s the bit by your eye that creates… tears.
The l-c-r of lacrimal sac maps to the l-g-r of lágrima.
Feliz (Spanish for “happiness”) comes from the Latin felix, meaning both “happy” and “fertile”.
It is indeed curious how, linguistically, happiness and having children and plentiful crops are deeply intertwined.
From the same root, we get the English felicity, which we can see in the f-l-z to f-l-c mapping very clearly.
Most distantly, we also have the English fecund and fetus.
Tornar (“to turn”) has given us directly an English word: tornado. A tornado turns, doesn’t it? Since this word came into English directly from Spanish – the word is unchanged from its Spanish participle form. We can see the t-r root clearly in all. And, if we go back a bit further, both words are also related to the English… turn.
Esmero, a Spanish word meaning “done with care” comes from the Latin prefix ex– combined with the Latin merus which meant, “unmixed; pure” (such as, pure wine — not diluted by water). Anything done with care will be pure, right?
From that same Latin root merus, we also get the English… mere. The interesting part is that, over the centuries, mere has gone on to almost take on the opposite of its original meaning: the original, more Latinate sense, was similar to “pure” and its Spanish derivative, done with care. But over time, in English at least, its become degraded and degraded to the point in which today, it means to do “just barely enough.” This is an example of a broader pattern: words tend to degrade over time.
We see the m-r root clearly in both languages.
