There are many words in our contemporary lexicon that we employ throughout every day speech. We usually tend to just know what the word is(or in some case, we use them incorrectly). Generally, humans perceive speech as just meaning instead of translating words when they’re speaking their native tongue. They hear “dog” and just know it’s a domestic canine. Behind a lot of these words are centuries of linguistic metamorphoses that took place over a vast period of time. Today, we will be taking a look into a variety of words which derive their meaning from elden terms and phrases.
The first is a word that many college students are very familiar with, and perhaps even have an infatuation with. That word is alcohol. Alcohol, like many words in English derives themselves from Arabic. Other words include lemon, algebra, admiral, and rice. The word alcohol was originally al-kohl in Arabic. Al is the definite article which is similar to the, and can also be used to denote possession in some cases. Kohl was the name for a powder composed of the metal antimony, and was used as eye makeup. This powder was heavily used in alchemy and then started to reference any distillation byproduct.
Now that we are on the topic of food, let’s review a very common one which many tend to consume. Yogurt. A lot of people that I’ve ran into believe that it’s a Greek word because of the popularity of Greek yogurt. The truth of the matter is that it’s a word derived from the Turkish word yog, meaning to condense. This references the process that milk goes to become yogurt.
Now that we have a few words concerning stuff people like, let’s talk about something that people don’t like much: war. At a first glance, war does not seem to be linked to any other language. It just seems like it is a pure English word. Well it’s really not. The English language’s vocabulary is comprised mainly of words from Dutch, Latin, French, German, as well as a variety of other languages(sushi from the Japanese, tofu from the Chinese, etc). War is actually derived from the French word for war, guerre. Yes, I know what you’re thinking! How in the world did we get war from guerre? It actually took quite a journey for guerre to turn into war. The British Isles are known for being common invasion grounds. The Saxons, Franks, Romans, Vikings, you name it. Now you can see why English has so many words derived from other languages. When the word guerre was introduced, it began to be read as werre. They pretty much just ditched the “g” and kept the rest. Over time, it began to get pronounced differently and ultimately ended up as the word we know today.
This was the first of my etymology series that I’ll be writing in the near future. The next installment will analyze the origin of guitar, a series of verbs, and a few more words borrowed from Arabic.
