This weekend I watched The Wicker Man...the original, extended version, not the supposedly crap-assed Nicolas Cage debacle. Sergeant Howie flies a seaplane to Summerisle and then is rowed ashore via a dinghy. That got me thinking about dinghy, it's a funny word.

Dinghy is from the Hindi dingi (the h in the English spelling is to indicate a hard g), meaning "small boat" and is perhaps related to the Sanskrit drona-m, "wooden trough", which is related to dru-s, "wood, tree". My guess is that dru-s must be related to the Indo-European root derew(o)-, also meaning "tree, wood". From this root we get the Greek drus "oak" and dryas "wood nymph", which is of course the root of our word dryad.

The Wicker Man [Amazon]
dinghy [Online Etymology Dictionary]
dryad [Online Etymology Dictionary]
dinghy [OED]
dryad [Wikipedia]

Labels: Greek, Hindi, PIE, Sanskrit, The Daily Hump

I love chickpeas. I love hummus. I love falafel. Falafel comes from the Arabic falāfil, which is the plural of filfil, meaning "pepper". It's likely that this word is related to the Sanskrit pippalī (long pepper), which comes from the Sanskrit pippalam, and referred to the pipal, a fig tree native to India. Incidentally, this is the same species of tree Siddhartha Gautama was sitting underneath when he became enlightened. That's one spicy Buddha.

Our word pepper is from this same root via the Old English pipor, Latin piper and Greek peperi.

pepper [AHD]
falafel [AHD]
pipal [AHD]
pepper [Online Etymology Dictionary]
sacred fig [Wikipedia]

Labels: Arabic, Greek, Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, The Daily Hump

According to Wikipedia

Hibernation is a state of inactivity and metabolic depression in animals, characterized by lower body temperature, slower breathing, and lower metabolic rate.

This process most often occurs in animals during the winter months, thus it should be of little surprise that the English word comes from a verb meaning "to winter", the Latin hibenare.

The Latin form is from the Proto-Indo-European root *gheim- meaning "snow" or "winter". The Sanskrit hima, meaning "snow", is also from this PIE root and gives us the name of Earth's highest mountain range, the Himalaya, which literally translates to "abode of snow". As a point of trivia there are a few animals which hibernate in the Himalaya and thus doubly rely on the *gheim- root; these include the Himalayan marmot and both the brown and black bear.

hibernation [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Himalaya [Online Etmology Dictionary]

Labels: Latin, PIE, Sanskrit, The Daily Hump

The knee. Dull stuff. Honestly, the only reason I chose knee for today's hump is because I thought it'd be fun to take a Nutella jar and Photoshop "Patella" onto it. In case you don't know patella is the scientific name for the knee-cap and is a diminutive of the Latin patina, meaning "plate" (because of its shape).

Similarly, Catholics use a small plate, a paten, to hold the host during the Eucharist. The Catholics are also known for genuflecting, the act of bending the knee, usually during worship. Genuflect is from the Latin genu (knee) + flectere (to bend). The Latin genu has analagous forms in other languages: Sanskrit janu, Greek gonu, Gothic kniu and Old English cneo. From the OE it's not difficult to see where our modern spelling comes from.

genuflect [OED]
knee [OED]
knee [Online Etymology Dictionary]
genuflect [Online Etymology Dictionary]
patella [AHD]
paten [AHD]

Labels: Gothic, Greek, Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, The Daily Hump

Most children first encounter the concept of a mulberry bush at a very early age. It's the place where monkeys chase weasels while dogs laugh in amusement until suddenly, rather inexplicably, the weasel "pops". (The cryptic nursery rhyme, which date back to 17th c England, apparently confounds many people.) The "mulberry bush" is actually not a bush at all, but rather a tree native to the warmer climates of Asia, Africa and North America. It's also economically valuable as the leaves are the sole food source for silkworms.

The word mulberry can obviously be broken in to two components. Analyzing the second element first, -berry comes from the Germanic languages, thus we find berie in Old English. This, in turn, is believe to come from the Old Teutonic *basjôn-, *bazjôn-. As the OED notes

The ulterior history is uncertain: *bazjo- has been conjecturally referred to *bazo-z [meaning "bare"] (q.v.), as if a bare or uncovered fruit, also to the root represented by [Sanskrit] bhas-, [meaning] "to eat".

To understand the first element, mul-, it's best if we look at the mulberrie's genus, Morus, which comes from the Latin word for the mulberry, morum. The plural of the Latin morum is mora, and in post-classical Latin (4th c.) this form became the feminine singular. By the 12th c. mora became more became moure and then the Old French mur. Finally, mur became mul and mulberry makes its first recognizable appearance in English in Wycliffe's Bible of 1382 ("cedres as longe mulberies").

If you're curious about that mur to mul transformation, R and L are very similar phonetically (both are alveolar consonants) and it's not surprising that one would transform into the other. To give you an idea of the letters' similarities

...in Korean, there is a phoneme /r/ that is a flapped r between vowels, and is an l-sound in other phonetic contexts. These sounds are very different to an English speaker, who is attuned to hearing them because the differences are meaningful in English. However, the native Korean speaker has learned from an early age to consider the two sounds the same. Thus, Korean speakers do not differentiate the two words "ram" and "lamb", despite the fact that both R and L sounds occur in the language.

Phonemes [Wikipedia]

Labels: Korean, Latin, Old English, Old French, Proto-Germanic, Sanskrit, The Daily Hump