67
While I'm sure a better-research answer might be able to give you more insight, perhaps a simple response will be a good place to start.
As you found, "history" comes from Greek ἱστορία (historia) via Latin historia. A "ἱστορία" generically means an "inquiry," and that is the sense that Herodotus intends in the famous opening lines of his Histories:
...
38
"Herstory" is completely unrelated to the etymology of "history"
As others have mentioned, there is no etymological connection between the first part of "history" and the English masculine pronoun "his". Nor does there need to be for "herstory" to make sense as a coinage in English. People frequently form new ...
28
As you mention, Latin hippopotamus, -i comes from Greek ἱπποπόταμος, which is a compound of ἵππος (hippos = horse) and ποταμός (potamos = river).
In Latin, Lewis and Short cites instances in Pomponius Mela (AD 45), Pliny (AD 79), and Ammianus Marcellinus (AD 400). In Greek, the LSJ includes references from Dioscorides (AD 90), Galen (AD c. 200), and ...
27
The origin of ordinal names seems to be unknown, but one theory dating back to Varro is that ordinal praenomen were originally used for children based on the month in which they were born (a custom which is however not attested in the historical period). You can find more details in this blog post by Peter Gainsford: "Why are there no Romans named ‘...
26
No, the similarity is almost certainly accidental. This kind of coincidental similarity is pretty common, especially in short words like ad.
Latin ad "to, near, at" has cognates in several other branches of Indo-European, including Celtic (Old Irish ad-), Phrygian (αδ-), and Germanic -- English at is among the latter. It appears to go back to a Proto-Indo-...
22
Presumably the basis of this made-up etymology is the fact that the words share a sequence of three letters. But amor comes from the root am- "love" plus the suffix -or, which is a common way to form abstract nouns. It does not contain an element mor that might be compared to mors (and even if it did, that wouldn't get us very far); the only thing shared ...
21
I believe there's no straightforward answer as to „why different usage contexts correlate to different grammatical gender“, but the etymological origin gives some insights to the gender.
Diēs comes from Proto-Indo-European *d(i)jéus „daytime sky, Sky-god“ and is cognate to Iūp-piter (≈ Diespiter, „dies pater“), so originally it should have been masculine, ...
20
The similarity is a coincidence; these words are unrelated. Etymological dictionaries such as De Vaan's give the following account of the two words:
The earlier form of the conjunction cum is quom; this is attested in early Latin, and also in the word quoniam (< quom iam). It is descended from Proto-Indo-European *kʷom "when" and has cognates in other IE ...
19
These words are unrelated: they developed independently from different Proto-Indo-European roots, according to Michiel de Vaan's Etymological Dictionary (337–38).
First, liber or librī, meaning "book," is thought to come from a PIE word meaning "leaf, rind": *lubʰ-ro-. De Vaan cites several Indo-European languages that have attested cognates and summarizes:...
answered May 25 '16 at 17:46
Nathaniel is protesting
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19
It's possible that the identity is a coincidence and that the adjective and the noun are unrelated homophones. De Vaan's etymological dictionary lists the two words as separate entries and does not draw any connection between them.
That said, it seems plausible that there is a relationship, namely that the "world" sense is based on a calque of the Greek ...
19
To elaborate unnecessarily, frāter can securely be traced back to PIE *bʰréh₂tēr, which is a combination of the root *bʰréh₂ + a suffix *-ter (+ the nominative singular ending *-s, which is lost with compensatory lengthening of the *-e- in the suffix, as per Szemerényi's law). That suffix, or at the very least one that looks exactly like it, is also seen in ...
18
di- is Greek and bi- is Latin
The Proto-Indo-European root for "two" is reconstructed as *dw-. The remnants of this w can be seen in English "two", Russian dva, Ancient Greek δύο, and many other languages, as well as Latin duo, "two".
Old Latin had many words starting with dv- (where v was pronounced as English "w"). ...
17
I believe this is one of many examples of Latin vowel reduction in word-internal syllables. The basic pattern is that short vowels in word-internal syllables were reduced: the resulting vowel in Classical Latin varies depending on the phonological context, and sometimes on the vowel. In inermis, the vowel is in a closed syllable, which is a context where a ...
16
While it's true that it's "standard" for the adjective to follow the noun, Latin word order is VERY flexible, and a noun following an adjective is not at all unusual. A quick search of the corpus at http://latin.packhum.org/search reveals that both appear more or less equally.
15
Professor Martin Maiden (Professor of the Romance Languages, Fellow of Trinity College) writes that
"The overwhelming majority of modern nouns and adjectives [in Italian - Alex B.] appear to derive from Latin accusative forms" (Martin 1995: 98; italics not mine).
for more details we need to read his 1996 paper, On the Romance inflectional endings ...
15
It used to be! At some point, the word seems to have been *cubi, as seen in compounds like alicubi "somewhere", nēcubi "not anywhere", sīcubi "if anywhere"; this came from the same root as quis and such, with the usual qu > c before u. (Compare aliquis.)
But at some point, it lost its initial C; re-analysis of nē-cubi as nec-...
14
I can only partially answer your question. In medieval documents dies is sometimes feminine where based on classical usage we would expect it to be masculine. Examples:
Liber Pontificalis1 (~10th century) 371, in reference to Charlemagne's arrival in Rome (but note that this text contains frequent grammatical irregularities):
Et alia die, secundum ...
14
That "U" is probably a "D": rem ordine pando. This is a quote from Vergil's Aeneid 3.179 and means "I explained the whole thing [i.e. the whole story] in order."
14
You're absolutely right that PIE *a gives Old Latin /a/. But somewhere between Old Latin and Classical Latin, vowel reduction happened.
Basically, Old Latin stress was always on the first syllable. So short vowels in other (non-stressed) syllables tended to get reduced, sort of like how English keeps the i in "combine" but reduces it in "combination".
In ...
14
That's what Quintilian implicitly said in his Institutio Oratoria (in the 1st century CE), and there's no real reason to doubt him in this case: the fact that the earliest attested plural form (in Plautus' Poenulus, almost three centuries earlier) is avo rather than avēte conforms to it being a Punic loan, and the Punic certainly started with ḥ (/ħ/ rather ...
13
As you say, “ly” is an early form of the Romance article; you can compare the Old French article for nom. sing. masc. "li". Aquinas uses it in his commentary on the Gospel of John 1,1 explicitly as the equivalent of the Greek article in its specifying sense:
Ut ergo Evangelista hanc supereminentiam divini verbi significaret, ipsum verbum absque ulla ...
13
The gist of Au101's answer is confirmed by de Vaan's Etymological Dictionary. First, regarding sex, in Proto-Italic and Proto-Indo-European, he gives:
PIt. *seks 'six', *seks-to- 'sixth'
PIE *(s)ueks 'six', *uks-ó- 'sixth'.
He notes:
The PIt. form *seks has analogically dropped *-w- from *sweks by analogy with *septm 'seven'.
Regarding sexus, there is ...
answered Sep 8 '16 at 12:46
Nathaniel is protesting
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13
According to Miller (2006: 76, 78), the endings -men and -mentum form a deverbal (with one exception) noun with the semantics of means, instrument or result of action of the verb. Relevant quotations are
§3.4 -men [...] ‘means, instrument, result’
While -men is formally and functionally related to -mentum (LG i.§326), the
latter will be treated ...
13
This may be useful: Eleanor Dickey (https://www.academia.edu/8113495/Latin_loanwords_in_Greek_A_preliminary_analysis_2012_, footnote 36, page 67) distinguishes between Latin words as foreign words, and Latin words as integrated loanwords. Her corpus of these Latin loanwords integrated into Greek is 'not yet finalized' but she claims there are 52 first ...
13
Well, this may obviously be outdated, but G.M. Messing banged out a 3-page treatment of "The Etymology of Lat. Mentula" for the Oct. 1956 Classical Philology (Vol. 51, No. 4, pp. 247–249).
His review of the scholarship to that point was
Lat. mentula 'membrum virile' has never been satisfactorily etymologized. Of the various suggestions made in the ...
13
Both words have the same prefix (con-), but the rest is different. cupere means “to desire”, cubare means “to lie down”. “p” is not “b”. “desire” is not “lying down”.
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Bibliography on this phenomenon: Poucet 1966: 140, supplemented by Burman 2018; if you have free time, you can also watch "(False) Etymology and ‘Sabine -l-‘" by Nicholas Zair - he presented it at the 14th Fachtagung of the Indogermanische Gesellschaft in Copenhagen in 2012 (Etymology and the European Lexicon; you can skip the Q&A session at ...
13
The etymological derivation of the noun fōmes, fōmitis from the base of the verb foveo is too difficult for me to answer. So in this post, I'll focus on something else in your post that I think I might be able to clarify: how the different forms of the noun are related to each other in Latin.
A fair number of Latin nouns inflect like fōmes, with a nominative ...
12
There is no significance to the word order, and both are perfectly acceptable in Latin. In fact, it is only in English translation that there is a difference felt. The genitive in Latin is perfectly at home come before or after the noun.
For example, Lucretius wrote De Rerum Natura while Cicero wrote De Natura Deorum. I'm afraid that's simply all there is ...
12
Lewis & Short say it came to refer to various things shaped like a thorn or prickle in its transferred senses, under which they group "backbone". Our backbone is a long, thin object, after all. Perhaps their sense number 2 elucidates the etymological path for you: a fish-bone. Those are pointed and can prick into your flesh, and they resemble backbones ...
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