Learning Spanish & Etymology Pattern-Matching for Nerds
The common Spanish word dar (“to give”) comes from the Latin for the same, dare.
From the Latin root, we get the English… mandate (“to give with your hand” — thus related to mano as well): what is a mandate if not a written order to give to someone? The best mandates are when you deliver them yourself anyway, not through intermediaries. The dare connection explains where the ‑d- after the hand comes from!
Another English word from the same root: tradition. That word comes from the Latin tradere, literally, “to hand over” — the tra- is the same trans- root (“over”), while the dere is the same “give.” In today’s way of walking, we’d say that tradition is what is handed down to us: it is what is given to us. Literally. ANd you can see the ‑d- in the word from dare as well clearly!
The Spanish tener (to hold) comes from the Latin tenere for the same.
From the same root tenere, we get the English tenet — think about it, you hold your beliefs.
And it gets even better: from tenere, we also get the English suffix ‑tain, as in maintain, sustain, contain, detain, obtain, and entertain. And the -tain words map almost identically to the Spanish suffix of the same, the same -tener!
For example, mano, the Spanish for hand, is the same mano in maintain (or mantener, in Spanish) — which thus literally means, “to hold in your hand”!
The Spanish for “blue,” azul, is originally an Arabic word referring to a particular type of valuable blue stone, the lapis lazuli. In Spanish, the word degraded over time, and the l- was lost (as though it was the the french l’ for “the”) and we were just left with azul for just “blue.”
The English for azure — which is really just a shade of blue! — comes from the same root, although azure still retains a luxury connotation that was lost with the simple blue implication of azul in Spanish.
Many languages, including Spanish, have an ‑l- and ‑r- shift, where, over time, the ‑l- and ‑r- sounds are swapped. We see this here, as the a‑z-l root of azul maps to the a‑z-r root of azure.
The Spanish for “cow” vaca, comes from the Latin vacca, meaning the same. From that same root, we get the English.… vaccine/em.
Huh? How?
Interestingly, the first, umm, vaccine, was to give the cow-pox virus to people with small-pox! Thus, the word for cow turned into the word for vaccine!
We can see the v‑c root clearly in both.
The Spanish mirar, “to look at” has two curious cousins in English: admire, mirror and miracle.
All come from the same Latin root, mirari, which meant “to wonder at”. We can see how they are all related to this same sentiment of awe and wonder:
The m‑r root is present in all versions, in English and Spanish, so the pattern is easy to spot.
Hat Tip 🎩 to The Marketing Scientist
