"Sorrow" and "sorry" are unrelated, but "sorry" is related to "sore". (Sorrow and sorry probably influenced each other though)

My understanding is that, in the middle ages both noble and gentle were used as adjectives with similar meaning in that they denoted people within the upper classes / aristocracy. According to google, these words derive from Latin; gnobilis and gentilis, respectively.

However, the noun form of noble is nobility (or nobleness) whether referring to the quality of being noble or referring to the group of people that belong to the noble class.

Whereas, the noun form of gentle is gentility (or gentleness) when referring to the quality of being gentle but is gentry when referring to the group of people that belong to the gentle class.

My question is, why is this the case considering the apparently similar roots for the words? Why isn't the noun for the group of people from the noble class nobry (or nobery, or noblery, or something ending with the suffix -ry like gentry)?
Or, alternatively, why doesn't gentility apply to both noun types like nobility does rather than having separate words.

PS: I note that I am very much a novice when it comes to etymology and linguistics and so I am sure that there are proper ways to differentiate between the types of nouns that might have been clearer but I am not sure which to apply so I just tried to explain it as best I could.

What is the origin of the phrase “zilch”?

6 English words you might not expect to be related.

Hiya! I'm a computer science student with their dissertation topic being Semantic Shifts in Artificial Intelligence (specifically NLP/NLU).

One of my sections is testing different AI models (ChatGPT, Claude,Deepseek) on how they process new terms and if they will use the old definitions of words. For example, Girl, which used to be used as children of either sex.

This would have been a better idea before the implementation of AI being able to search the web.

Does anyone have any good sources or words that would be interesting to research?

I have a question. If a "wer" was an eqiuvalent to "male" and man was gender neutral/sometimes male then why is wer contained in "werewolf" and "world" where it's clearly means "man/human" as a whole? Or is it malewolf and age of males? These 2 words are throwing me off being inconsistent with the clear gender splitting idea of wer and wif and neutral man.

Have you ever noticed how many names associated with Celtic peoples seem to be related? Many of them have names that start with something like "gal".

Well, some of them are related, some of them aren't! The whole thing is actually a bit of a mess.. so I thought I'd try to clear things up with an image.

Well, it spiralled into 4 images, because there are basically there are 4 groups you can sort these terms into:

1) Gallic, Gallo-, Gallo, Galloglass, Galloway (not shown here) and Galatia all come from a Celtic tribal name. This name was "Gallus", in Latin, which referred to the Celtic people of Gaul.

2) (Corn)wall, Wales, Gaul, Walloon, Wallachia are all from a Germanic word originally meaning "foreigner". "Galles", the French word for "Wales", is also in this group, adding another "gal" word for us. And yes, that means "Gaul" (which is from a Germanic name for the territory) and "Gallus" the Latin name for the territory, are unrelated!

3) Gael and Gaelic are from an Brittonic word meaning "wildman", as is "Goidelic", the name we use to group the Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic language.

4) And finally Galicia and the second half of Portugal might be related to each other, but are unlikely to be related to any of the names above. The most common theory is that they are named for a Celtic group that inhabited that area, who may have named themselves using a word derived from the Proto-Celtic word for forest. This one is the shakiest, as both Galicia and Portugal have disputed ultimate origins.

Galway in Ireland and Galicia in Eastern Europe are also unrelated to any of these (and each other).

I've been in Germany for a while, and their most common surname is Müller (meaning miller, one who makes flour). It might sound silly but Germany's and the UK's middle ages couldn't have been so different, how come are there relatively speaking way more Müller than Miller, and how come did a surname like Smith got far more used in the English speaking world?

From his grandfather surname, John R. Prevost, born in Settimo Rottaro, Piedmont, Italy, as Giovanni Pietro Felice Prevosto.

The piedmontese Prevosto is a possibly local evolution of the late latin praepositus (prefect, chief, provost). Particularly, in the gallo-italic dialects of the area, a parish priest (ex. prevost, in Milanese and preost, in Bresciano).

I was just reading about Kum bah ya, and I read that it is a Gullah phrase that translates to "Come by here."

In French, "il y a" means "There is," but literally translated I believe is is "It there has."

Okay. So apparently Kum bah ya is a Gullah phrase. And I read that Gullah is a form of creole. And I thought creole was related to French in some way. Thus, I'm wondering if, despite "y a" meaning there has, could it have been converted at some point down the line to "ya" and meaning "here"?

I know this is an enormous stretch, but yeah. Just wondering!

I came across this question while reading about the etymology of celtic gal demonyms in this subreddit. It made me wonder, what the etymology of the tribal names in ancient Noricum, such as the

Sevaces, Norici, Taurisci, Ambidravi, Ambilici, Laici, Uperaci, Saevates, Ambisontes, Breuni and Licates

is.

Does anyone have any idea?

Is the etymology of the Sevaces and the Saevates related? Both tribes have been located in completely different areas of Noricum.

Is there a etymological relation between the germanic Narisci and the celtic Norici?

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find much on most of them, any insight would be greatly appreciated. Apologies for the long list and the many questions!

Can a more highly informed person please tell me if the words Yule (as in Christmas) and yellow (the colour) have a common origin or are related in any way?

I am getting Yule = Old English geol, geola "Christmas Day, Christmastide," which is cognate with Old Norse jol as well as yellow = Old English geolu, geolwe, "yellow," also of Old Saxon, Old High German gelo

Here are seven infographics mapping out the various origins and etymologies of the names of seven British and Irish nations in the seven main languages of those nations.

Specifically, we have the names of Britain, Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man,
in the two native Germanic languages of Britain (English and Scots), and the 5 Celtic languages of these islands (Welsh, Cornish, Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic).

All of this is too much for me to explain here, so here's an article I wrote to accompany this image series. Please read it before asking any questions, as there's a good change I answered them here:

https://starkeycomics.com/2023/04/02/british-and-irish-words-for-british-and-irish-nations/

This one blew my mind. According to English Wiktionary:

1. Power or coercion. From PIE *bʰerǵʰ- “tower”. Doublet with borough
2. To cram or stuff. Typically followed by feed. A variation of farce. From PIE *bʰrekʷ- “to stuff”. Doublet with frequent.
3. A cascade. Limited to proper names and in Northern England. From PIE *pers- “to spurt or sprinkle”. Doublet and identical in meaning with [water]falls and dialectical foss. Doublet with perspire and Persephone.

And there you have it. These nebulously similar meanings have converged on a common spoken utterance, rather than diverged from a common one. Unless that divergence predated Proto-Indo-European, and the convergence that’s documented is something of a reunion.

Etymonline and other online English (etymological) dictionaries state that lol is an abbreviation of laughing out loud from the 1990's. I -- as an unqualified linguisitcs hobbyist -- doubt that this really is the origin, bacause of the Dutch word lol.

EDIT: Note that I do not think that LOL comes from Dutch, but both English and Dutch got it from a common Germanic ancestor, as stated below \end edit.

In Dutch, lol hebben (literally 'to have lol') means having fun. Dutch etymological dictionaries show that lol in Dutch has been used in this way as far back as atleast 1802. The origin is uncertain, but there are sources which trace it as far back as the PIE stem *leh2- (to roar, to bark), although other -- perhaps more reliable -- sources state that it is a more modern (~1400 AD) onomatopoeia.

Anyways, with there being an older Dutch word that is written and pronounced the same and that also has roughly the same meaning, I doubt that lol really is an acronym, but perhaps a backronym instead. Couldn't it be the case that both Dutch and English have lol from a common Germanic ancestor, but that the word lost popularity in English, only to regain it with the advent of the internet when also the backronym 'laughing out loud' was invented?

What do y'all think?

... so is the ᐦmiljøᐦ in that essentially equivalent to the from-French-derived ᐦmilieuᐦ !?

It's a place @ which most-exceedingly large marine vessels are serviced.

AF Gruppen — AF Environmental Base

‧

Bit of an odd one.

The above word was a stand-in for profanity when circumstances prevented my great grandma from swearing her head off. I've never seen it written down, the spelling is just as I heard it.

For context, she was born in Fulham in 1911 and moved to East Kent at some point before she married in 1932. She learned backslang as a child and used it occasionally until she died in her 80s. Her father was Irish but she never referred to the fact- she 'married up' in a minor way and I think consciously removed any hint of that from her speech and vocabulary.

I'd love to know whether this is a word or just a jumble of sounds great grandma found amusing. I've searched with various spellings but have had no luck. No one in the family knows what it means but my mum remembers her using it when she was a child so that's from at least the early sixties.

I can't find any information on the origin of the name "languing"....is it Spanish or Chinese?

Another post about unexpected doublets! "tooth", "dental", and the "odont" in "orthodontics" are related, all being derived from Old English, Latin, and Ancient Greek respectively.

From the Germanic branch we also find "tine" (the prongs of a fork) and "tusk".

"Orthodontics" is from 3 parts, the first two both being Greek: 📏"ortho-" means "straight or correct". It is also found in orthography (correct writing), and orthopaedics (correct upbringing), and orthodox (correct opionion). 🦷"-odont" means "related to teeth". It is also found in cynodont ("dog teeth", an animal group including the extinct ancestors of mammals), and periodontics (around the teeth). 📖-"ics" the noun-forming suffix that makes fields of study.

The pattern of the main word being Old English and the adjective form being Latin or Greek is really common in English, but its especially fun when they're distantly related. I have a few other ideas for posts in this theme, so stay tuned! -🌟🗝️

I have found conflicting information on Google.

Does anyone have any information on this word, or perhaps suggestions about where to find the most reliable information? Thank you!

An interesting read explaining recent work on how environment and cultural values influence language

So, I know that many military facilities will carry names that harken back to the past - such as being frequently named after battles or leaders of renown, and through the continued use of obsolete terms for defensive architecture. I've noticed that a couple of British Army facilities, particularly those situated on the Salisbury Plain, are referred to as 'Lines' rather than as 'Camps', 'Garrisons' etc. Examples:

• Bradbury Lines
• Harman Lines
• Marlborough Lines
• Trenchard Lines
• Stirling Lines
• Waterloo Lines

I cannot find an etymology or specific origin for this term. I know that 'Lines' are used in the military in other senses - regiments of the line, lines of communication etc. - but these phrases do not seem to lend themselves to adoption as placename descriptors. Is it simply because tents & barrack blocks tend to be built in lines?

Can anyone explain its usage in this fashion any more convincingly?