Tag Archives: Linguistics

Root, route and rout

Posted 27 days ago by John Gray

The words ‘root’ and ‘route’ are homophones in British English (in other words, they are pronounced in the same way), whilst most Americans would pronounce ‘route’ to rhyme with ‘out’ or ‘shout’. The root is that part of a plant …

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The Spanish word for left

Posted 34 days ago by John Gray

Basque loanwords abound in contemporary Spanish. They include caspa, dandruff, manteca, lard (origin of mantequilla, butter), pestaña, eyelash (and now ‘tab’ in the sense of internet browser), and páramo, moorland, alongside many other less evocative terms. But I was particularly …

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The history of dollar

Posted 61 days ago by John Gray

The word dollar has a curious and convoluted history. It is derived, as a word, from Thaler, which itself comes from the the Joachimsthal silver mine in Bohemia. In 1519, the silver from Joachimsthal was first used to mint the …

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Basque words in English

Posted 84 days ago by John Gray

Basque is a fascinating language. Despite speculations that it may, somehow, be related to language groups from Eastern Europe, it is essentially that rarest of linguistic phenomena, a language that emerged independently of its neighbours, and preserved its individuality throughout …

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The etymology of slave (and robot)

Posted 116 days ago by John Gray

The word slave comes from the Byzantine Greek σκλάβος, via Middle Latin Sclavus, from which root Italian gets schiavo, French esclave, and Spanish esclavo. The original meaning of the word was ‘Slav’, as in ‘Slavic’: apparently a certain Otto the …

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