1375: primitive and primate Sep 16, 2018

Often, looking at patterns in suffixes and pronunciation thereof can lead to insights about words' histories. For instance, it is often the case that nouns and verbs such as 'graduate' have the same ending when written but are pronounced consistently differently, but in the rare case when this is not possible and there is only a verb, like with 'create', there will be an adjective 'creative' with '-ive'. Coincidentally, the noun 'primate' seems to have a correlate with 'primitive', but aside from the slightly different spelling, this is not much more than historical luck, as neither is a direct derivative of the other. Instead, they simply both come from the Latin 'primus' meaning 'first'.