ihave a thing for language and language roots

bookhobbit:

bookhobbit:

‘female’ and ‘male’ are not etymologically related but ‘beech’ and ‘book’ quite possibly are and ‘shade’ and ‘shadow’ are just two different cases of the same word fossilized into different meanings

goes to show why you can’t just go with what sounds similar when tracing etymology

nobody asked for the Proof but I’m studying for my historical linguistics exam so you get them anyway:

female is from Old French femelle>Latin femella>diminutive of femina>from ‘the one who gives suckle [like to a baby]’ from PIE root *dhei ‘to suck’ (the dead silence of people purposefully not giggling when my professor defined this in class as ‘to give suck’ was something to behold)

male is from Old French masle>Latin masculus>diminutive of mas which we don’t know the origin of

we should pronounce female more like ‘feml’ and we should probably spell it closer to the French, but it got respelled and repronounced based on male because of the obvious semantic relationship between the two, which is a phenomenon sometimes called contamination (and a very common one)

shade is from old english sceadu which had the oblique case ‘sceadwe’; because of a rule which makes vowels with no consonants after the end of the syllable long, and vowels that have two consonants after them short, the Great Vowel Shift applied to one and not the other, which resulted in different forms, at some point they specialized into slightly different meanings (also extremely common)

book and beech are slightly fuzzier but they might be from the same Proto-Germanic root, the idea being one of writing on beech material, also fun fact which I can’t cite bc it’s from my textbook, the plural of book used to be beech probably from vowel mutation processes (like foot/feet) combined with a particular type of consonant mutation common in Old English (which is why the English for church is ‘church’ while the Proto-Germanic was *kirika)