836: happy, cordial, and cereal Mar 23, 2017

Not all adjectives have an adjectival suffix, but enough do that there are usually some good indicators of what is, or was, the form of the word as a noun. 'Happy' does indeed come from the noun, 'hap' which used to mean, 'luck', in the same way that the German, 'glücklich' means both 'happy' and 'lucky', even if no one much uses 'hap' anymore. This trick works with an interesting effect for other words like, 'cordial' which has the common '-al' suffix. This word, denoting friendly or strong feelings and also liqueur or medicine meant, in Middle English, ‘belonging to the heart’. While that is still mostly true, it takes some sleuthing to see that this adjective comes from the Latin, 'cord' (‘heart’), which was not adopted into English as a noun, in the way that English has both, 'ether' and 'ethereal', though that is largely because it was adopted as a noun first. This is also apparent in some words that aren't even adjectives, such as 'cereal'. While now this isn't an adjective at all, it was in the 19th century, and related to the Roman goddess of agriculture, 'Ceres'.