We all know that the plural of foot is not *foots but feet. This is, by the large majority of English teachers and speakers alike, dismissed as an irregular feature shared by a bunch of other equally irregular nouns, but the formation of the plural of foot actually...
English star, German Stern, Italian and Latin stella, Greek αστηρ (astēr) and Hindi तारा (tārā), all started with an agricultural metaphor. They are derived from the Indo-European root for to strew, which is reflected in Sanskrit as स्तृ (stṛ). The use of this root in...
The common word for king is राजा (rājā) in Sanskrit, βασιλευς (basileus) in ancient Greek and cyning in Old English. But in poetic diction these languages also all share a number of very similar circumlocutions, i.e. descriptive terms or so called speaking...
To students who are new to Hindi, terms such as विद्यार्थी (vidyārthī = student) or अध्यापक (adhyāpaka = teacher) might seem a bit daunting and, without doubt, not only a bit too complicated for what they describe. That native speakers are, to a certain extent,...
Copain in French means mate. The word consists of co-, meaning together (as in coworker), and pain, the French word for bread, making a mate a person with whom one shares a meal, one’s daily bread. The word company has the same...
The word amazon is of Greek origin and is not a really an exotic tribal name, but pure and simply a descriptive term. It consists of the privative prefix a- (as in a-theist) and the noun mazos meaning breast. It alludes to the popular belief that Amazons cut of their...
