English

Etymologien

Are Words trees?

Languages and words are often talked about in terms of trees. How legit is this metaphor? Read on…

salad, salami and salary

They all descend from salt, i.e. Latin sal: Read on…

Iguanas, nadders and alligators

Iguana is Leguan in German. How come? Read on…

The language of the World Bank

Comparing the annual reports of the World Bank from seven decades shows that the language is getting more abstract and blurry. Read on…

seedy

„Seedy“ seems to be perceived as having to do with sperm (of some). Where does it actually come from? Read on…

Lincoln speech, trumpified

The Gettysburg Address, as it might have been delivered by Donald Trump. Read on…

Booyakasha

I have to confess, I still find this rather funny: Read on…

„Resilvering“ – an English metaphor

A mirror, in IT, is an array of two hard drives that are linked in order to save exactly the same data, mainly for redundancy reasons – and, as such, mirroring each other. Read on…

That’s a vowel.

Picture: Read on…

The roots of ‚roots‘

Roots, Wurzeln and rādīcēs all go back to the same Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root: *u̯r(e)h₂d- (or something like that). English root is borrowed from Scandinavian. In Old Icelandic it was spelled rót, Read on…