69
votes
Is "history" a male-biased word ("his+story")?
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) ...
- 42.6k
41
votes
Accepted
Is "history" a male-biased word ("his+story")?
"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 ...
- 29.8k
33
votes
Accepted
Why hippopotamus instead of potamohippus?
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 ...
- 42.6k
29
votes
Why did so many Romans name their children after ordinal numbers?
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 ...
- 29.8k
29
votes
Accepted
On the birth of Latin language
Well, the simple answer is that its predecessors weren't "more basic". Latin has actually lost several noun cases and regularized its verbs significantly from the way Proto-Indo-European ...
- 69k
25
votes
Accepted
Is there a relationship between the word amor (love) & mors (death)?
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 ...
- 31.5k
25
votes
Accepted
Why do so many names end with -us?
In Latin, -us marks the name as being (likely to be) masculine and the subject of a sentence. When Latin names are used in English, the second part is treated as irrelevant, but the association with ...
- 29.8k
24
votes
Accepted
Is Latin qui a descendant or predecessor of Persian که (kë)?
Neither is descended from the other. They're both descended from Proto-Indo-European, which had a root looking something like *kʷi- for this purpose.
You'll find similar-looking words in a lot of Indo-...
- 69k
21
votes
Accepted
Are the two cums related?
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; ...
- 31.5k
21
votes
Accepted
Are the words catastrophe and atrophy related?
These words aren't originally from Latin, but from Greek. If you look at their entries in Wiktionary, it points back to the Greek nouns that got borrowed into Latin, and the Greek verbs that begat ...
- 69k
20
votes
Accepted
How do we know that Italian words come from accusatives, not ablatives?
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 ...
- 11.7k
19
votes
Accepted
frater < "fere" + "alter"?
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 ...
- 10.8k
18
votes
Accepted
Is the prefix "di-" more Latin-like than "bi-"?
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, ...
- 69k
18
votes
Accepted
Why 'Vir' is the only word of 2nd declension with -ir ending?
Vir developed its s-less ending from the process of syncope described in Alex B.'s answer to "Why do some 2nd decl. "-er" adjectives and nouns drop the "e" in the stem?": ...
- 29.8k
17
votes
Accepted
If arm is 'arma', why is unarmed 'inermis' and not 'inarmis'?
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 ...
- 29.8k
17
votes
Accepted
Is there a root word for -scendo?
Rather than scendo, the word you're looking for is scando, for which De Vaan's Etymological Dictionary has the following:
- 10.8k
17
votes
Why is the Latin word for plum so close to the name of Damascus?
Apparently so! Even in English, we still have the word "damson" for a particular type of plum (Prunus insititia), which comes from Damascena.
However, just like in English, it didn't refer ...
- 69k
16
votes
Accepted
Homo Novus vs Novus Homo
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 ...
- 16.6k
16
votes
Accepted
How does "regina" derive from "rex"?
The root of rēx is rēg- (compare the genitive rēgis), which explains the first part. But where does that -īna come from?
One theory is that it comes from a Proto-Indo-European *h₃rēǵ-nih₂ "queen&...
- 69k
15
votes
How do we know that Italian words come from accusatives, not ablatives?
Italian noun and adjective forms are not derived exclusively from Classical Latin accusative forms:
Sometimes an Italian form comes from the Classical Latin nominative, as in the singular form of the ...
- 29.8k
15
votes
Does mentula ("penis") derive from the same root as mens ("mind"), and if so why?
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 ...
- 776
15
votes
Accepted
Are concubine and concupiscence ultimately related?
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”.
- 18k
15
votes
Accepted
What's up with 'ubī'?
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 ...
- 69k
15
votes
The Meaning of Scelerisque?
Nothing to do with chocolate (of which the Romans were of course sadly ignorant).
Sceleris is the genitive singular form of the noun scelus "evil deed, crime". It means "of an/the evil ...
- 31.5k
15
votes
Is there a word for ephemeral but meaning lasting one night?
While Greek ἐφήμερος (ephēmeros) literally means "for one day", it was often used metaphorically to refer to anything that lasts a short time. For example, mortals were ephēmeroi in the eyes ...
- 69k
14
votes
Accepted
Does 'noel' really have its origin in Latin?
From the etymology of Noel (Ortolang):
Étymol. et Hist. A. Subst. masc. 1. début xiies. «fête de la nativité de Jésus-Christ» al Naël Deu (Saint Brendan, 620, éd. E. G. R. Waters); 1119 Noel (...
- 18k
14
votes
What is the meaning of "REM ORUINE PANDO"
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."
cmw♦
- 57.6k
14
votes
Accepted
Why is it Iuppiter rather than Iuppater?
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. ...
- 69k
14
votes
Is "history" a male-biased word ("his+story")?
'Herstory' is not much more than a nonce-word. It's the sort of thing that used to be quoted by feminists in order to demonstrate how wrongfully the world, even the English language, had been arranged ...
- 18.2k
14
votes
Does D/L variation go back to a dl cluster?
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 ...
- 11.7k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible