1997: Why 'Niece' and 'Nephew Sound so Different Jun 3, 2020

-

In a family, nieces and nephews have to be related, but the terms for something quite basic and personal in its meaning look very different to one another. In many forms of Indo-European languages, it is the same word for 'grandson' as it is for 'nephew', basically just denoting a younger non-child relative. There are approximated roots of *néptih for women and *népōts for men; you might notice that looks like 'nepotism' and that would be a correct assumption. Even in Middle English, these words looked more similar, with the masculine 'neve' and the feminine 'nift', and the main difference today is because English went on to adopt the dialectal French 'nevu' (nephew) and 'nece' (niece), which are ultimately from the same Indo-European roots, but in the case of 'niece', the [s] sound assimilated from a [t], as in the German 'Nichte'. While many forms today do indeed look different, that is a fairly common process for older and somewhat culturally specific words to really morph over time.

Support Word Facts on patreon.com/wordfacts

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1511: "I'll be home in 3 days; don't wash" Might be False Jan 31, 2019

-
Image
Check out the latest podcast on the Patreon for as little as $1: • It is very easy for misinformation to spread so long as there is a grain of truth to it, such as the line of ' let them eat cake ', which was probably never said by Marie Antoinette. Another such disputed quote is "I return in 3 (or 5 or 8) days; don't wash" said by Napoleon to his wife Josephine. This quote is more likely to have been written than that attributed to Antoinette as he did often write her love letters, but many of the original lines from which the now-famous quote could have been drawn are often contradictory or not so reliable.
Continue »

852: delilah Apr 8, 2017

-
Plenty of common Western names have some biblical relevance. It is usually from the frequency of these names that terms like 'john' referring to a man who hires prostitute, or foundation the baseball team, Yankees , come about. Some names, such as 'Delilah', are also used as nouns separate from the name, but with connotations stemming from Scripture, and not contemporary connotations. It is from the story of Samson and Delilah where the sense of the word as 'seductress' began, but the name was around for much longer than this. There is disagreement concerning the true etymology of this word, but it either comes from the Hebrew element 'dal' meaning 'weak' or the Hebrew for 'delight'. Unlike other much older names like 'Matthew' or 'John', 'Delilah' only started to be used as a name in the 17th century with the Puritans, though it gained more popularity following Saint-Saens' opera, Samson and Delilah (1877). Li...
Continue »

Important Announcement: Blogspot Access Will Close

-
There will be no additional new content hosted on this blogspot account, and in 4 weeks from now (30th of September 2020), the blogspot account will no longer be publically available. If you are subscribed via email, please visit WordFacts.Org and subscribe via email there; there is a link to do so on the bottom of every page, so you will only need to scroll all the way down on any page you are on (see video below if needed). Apologies for the inconvenience, but the blog, video, and commercial services are now being moved specifically to WordFacts.Org 
Continue »