889: chthonic and humble May 15, 2017

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While it is not possible to know the etymology of all words without doing some research beforehand, generally if one knows to look for various signs it is reasonable to make some guesses. For example, if a word begins with a silent letter like M in 'mnemonic' or P in 'pterodactyl' it would be fair to guess that it comes from Greek (and they both do here), because those sounds are possible in Greek but would not be in the beginning of natively English words. Other words that have silent beginnings like with 'chthonic' and 'chthonian' have fairly common suffixes as far as English vocabulary is concerned, but the initial CH which is not pronounced. These words mean 'relating to the underworld' and come from the Greek 'khthōn' meaning ‘earth’. Not all words that come from or are related to Greek ones have to have these sort of spellings, as is the case with 'humble' which is from the Latin 'humus' for ‘ground’, and is akin to 'khthōn'.

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