I don’t plan to learn latin any time soon, but I am interested on the etymology of words, and a lot of them come from Latin. I just wanted to ask if there’s someone that can read Latin or any other dead language, and if you have noticed some of the roots and made your own discoveries. I like when I see explanations of words like “perfect”, which comes from “per” and “facere”. Together they mean “completed”, you are never complete, so you will never be perfect. I always see these kind of things thrown around and I wanted to know if some of them are noticeable if you have a good level of Latin.
Edit: a dead language is a language that doesn’t have native speakers, so latin is a dead language. An extinct language is one that no one speaks, even as a second language.
Far from a dead language, but your example is interesting in that the Russian word for “perfect” also means “complete” (совершенный/sovershennij: absolute, complete, perfect). The verb is совершать/sovershat’: to accomplish, to perform, to commit, to perpetrate, to make.
English is a strange beast – a Germanic language with Latin words. One thing I’ve found that makes learning Russian easier (it needs things to make it easier!) is that it is a Slavic language with Slavic words with Slavic roots – you begin to recognize that many words are composed of other regular Russian words rather than some obscure dead foreign language. I immediately promote to level 2 new lingqs that I easily recognize the roots of.
A new learner may encounter противоречить/protivorechit’ and need to memorize it as “to contradict” without any further clues. An experienced Russian learner may immediately recognize that it consists of против/protiv (againist) and речь/rech’ (speech, discourse) and a common verb ending: so “to speak against”. And this example is even more interesting in that the Russian roots mean exactly the same thing as the Latin roots of the English word, contra and dict.
Back to совершать/sovershat’. It’s not as transparent, and I just learned it outright as it stands. But it starts with со-/so-, which as a prefix can mean ‘with’ or ‘syn-’ and perhaps more. Вер/ver in many other words, and perhaps here, has the same origin as Latin ver-, as in veritas, verify, verily, etc. Russian вера/vera: faith, belief, trust; верить/verit’: to believe; проверять/proveryat’: to verify, examine. So those might be roots of совершать/sovershat’, but it’s not nearly as clear as my first example.
I explained the thing about dead language in the edit. I am learning Russian and I haven’t noticed any of the relations that you are saying, maybe as my level goes up I will start noticing them more. The coolest and weirdest thing that I’ve noticed is that world and peace are the same word.
I do read Latin and some Greek and I’ve dabbled a tiny bit in Pali. Since my current target language is Indonesian/Malay, my most recent discoveries are in those languages. I love the “suka” (like) [which, by the way, strikes Russian speakers aс really odd] vs “duka” (suffering) duo, which comes from Sanskrit. “Duka” (caló variant “duquela”), in particular, also exists in Romani (Gypsy language) and has found its way into Flamenco music. For example: Requiebros "Al bailar por sevillanas" - YouTube
As for Khardy’s examples for Russian: many expressions in German and Russian (among other languages) are “calques”. That is, they don’t borrow the Latin/Greek word but make up the same idea using Germanic/Slavic roots. Interesting examples include Wasserstoff/водород for “hydrogen”. Sauerstoff/кислород for “oxygen”.
As for interesting Latin etymologies, there are tons of them. Virtue/virtud/vertu, etc. comes from “vir”, meaning man [male person, Sp. “varón”]. Latin “virtus” was originally “manhood”, the characteristics of an ideal man in the Roman society, which would include courage and endurance.
“Case”/caso, etc. comes from “casus” meaning “fall”, from the verb “cadere” (origin of Sp. “caer”). That’s true both for the meaning of “circumstance” (that wich “befalls”) and for the grammatical term: a case is related to how a word finishes or falls. Again, some languages have calqued the idea. German has “Fall”, Russian has “падеж” from падать.
There are lots and lots more. Essntially most words that modern speakers consider abstract had more concrete meaning in their origins.
@khardy: btw, since you enjoy word history in general and in Russian in particular, do check out this wonderful channel: Микитко сын Алексеев - YouTube [A further plus are the awesome looks]
Words ending -tion come from Latin. In fact they come from French in which language they are feminine nouns. these are nouns derived from verbs. Example composition from componere, meaning put toghether.
words ending in -ity also have Latin origin.
Endings in -ent also. Those are participles in Latin. example continent from continere. meaning that contains something.
Endings in -ment come from Latin neuter nouns that became French masculine nouns like regiment compliment
-ulus -ula are latin diminutives. celule, molecule
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Adjectives in -al or -ar, like principal capital linear and a lot more
I liked the ullus or ulla example. There are some other weird examples, that may be wrong now. Pedos “kid”, philos “to love”= pedophile, person who loves kids (makes no sense now) or Sofia “wisdom” and philos “to love”= philosophy, to love wisdom.
"A new learner may encounter противоречить/protivorechit’ and need to memorize it as “to contradict” without any further clues. An experienced Russian learner may immediately recognize that it consists of против/protiv (againist) and речь/rech’ (speech, discourse) and a common verb ending: so “to speak against”. And this example is even more interesting in that the Russian roots mean exactly the same thing as the Latin roots of the English word, contra and dict. "
That’s also true for German widersprechen - wider = against and sprechen = to speak.
I don’t know a lot about etymology but I find it interesting as well. The only one that I can think of is habit (item of clothing) in french. In Finnish there is the word habitus, in Finnish it has the meaning of how one presents him/herself or how someone is perceived by other.
I just found another nice example of a Russian “calque”. It shows up in this video from the channel “Russian from Russia” which I recommend very much. I especially like the new series about vocabulary (directions, senses, maths, hand movements, head movements, etc.) which goes way beyond the basics and provides lots of examples in context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKTsVJke97U&list=PLQE6UiJ7xOxRd1frOSTmTBbFQ5FLg9z7Z
The calque example is about fractions:
In a fraction (дробь):
numerator (from “numerus” = number) = числитель (that which numbers)
denominator (from “nomen” = name) = знаменатель (that which names)
Fraction itself comes from “fractus”, broken, from verb “frangere”
Etymology helps me such a great deal that I started Latin mainly (though not only) for that reason: to be able to connect the dots between other indoeuropean languages.
I’ve been looking for a couple of examples in my vocab list to show what I mean:
Latin auxere, from “augeo” - to augment → related to english “to eke out” as in “to eke out a living” from obsolete “to eke” (to augment )
Latin “censeo” to think → cognate of russian судить (to judge)
Latin “crastinum”: tomorrow → descendant “to procrastinate”
I do this in other languages as well, another example:
Russian думать : to think → cognate english “to deem”
Russian дом : house → cognate Latin “domus” (house) → domestic
Who would have thought that “Pferd” (german for “horse”) comes from latin “paraveredus”? (the native Ross was tossed aside for Pferd. Ironically latin discarded “equus” for a loanword from Celtic, “caballus”, origin of the word “cavalry”).
I think this method is both interesting and useful. It helps me get a deeper understanding of my own native language (Spanish) as well as other European languages.
The Wiktionary seems to work quite well for Latin. In other languages like Russian I had to search elsewhere sometimes.
Virus is unrelated, it meant “poison” in latin
“Virtual” (lat. virtualis) does in fact come from “virtue”. It means “in effect”
It would be the opposite of “factual” (factualis), “in fact”
“Virtual” is that which has the same “virtue” or power as something else but is in fact different from it. From there the meaning evolved to “simulated”, “imitative”
Same in German, again: "“Zähler” (that which numbers/ counts) for numerator and “Nenner” (that which names) for denominator. Fraction is “Bruch”, i,e. break as in something that is broken.
As a native Russian speaker living in Germany, I can often see such calques. I wanted to know if Russian loaned the German words or vice versa. The anser seems to be they both loaned the Latin words. It does not matter if directly or maybe through French.
Yes, I found out “Ross” reading german in Lingq the other day. That is actually how I found out Pferd was not germanic in origin, by reading about “Ross”. I was quite surprised!
I didn’t say that is the origin of “circumstance”. It’s obvious that it comes from “standing around”. I said that this was the meaning of the word “case” in the sense of “circumstance”. Such as in “best case scenario” and similar expressions. “Casus” meant “fall” and I tried to explain the logic by linking it to English “befall” which has the same logic to it
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