Learning Spanish & Etymology Pattern-Matching for Nerds

Vinculo and Wind

The Spanish vínculo (“a link, connection, something that binds something to something else”) comes from the Latin for the same, vinculum.

A distantly related word is the English wind — not in the sense of what blows in your face on a windy day but rather in the sense of winding a clock (remember those ancient clocks?). Wind (again, in this sense) comes from the Proto-Indo-European *wendh- (“to turn, weave, or wind”)  from which we also get the Latin vinculum and finally the Spanish vínculo.

We can see that the v-n of vínculo maps to the w-n of wind.

what is the etymological way to learn spanish?

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

patterns to help us learn spanish:

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