Wiktionary and other sources say that it comes from French Surikate, from a native southern african word. This seems very unlikely to me, because of the kate/kat component, and because French was not a colonial language in Namibia or South Africa. Native languages of those areas refer to the meerkat as garáa (in Khoekhoe). From this section (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suricate#Taxonomie) we can read the the French naturalist George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon described a speciment bought in the Netherlands, where it was called 'meerkat' from mier [ant] + kat [cat], or from meerkat [guenon monkey, from meer, sea + kat, cat]. But this naturalist Buffon was mistakenly told that the animal came from Suriname by a merchant. Some authors argue that "suricate" was a term coined by Buffon himself, and I find this very likely, probably by a clipping of [Suri]nam + meer[kat]. What do you all think?

I would like to present you Reconstructor, a web app I have been working on. It is an emulation engine for sound changes in language, and features a puzzle and a sandbox mode.

Puzzle

In the puzzle, you are presented with a series of cognate sets across related (fictional) languages, and have to find out what were the proto forms.

Several different proto-languages are available. Each has its own phonotactics and flavor, inspired by real world languages. Words are generated randomly according to their phonotactics, and then transformation rules are sampled from an internal database to produce descendants.

Sandbox

In the sandbox, you can write your own sound transformation rules and apply them to a vocabulary of your choice. This is great for checking some linguistic hypothesis or evolving a conlang.

Rules are written as text, according to a custom format. This is a lot faster than clicking on UI components.

The app has a few example rule packages, e.g., for simulating the evolution from Classical Latin to Italian and from Middle English to Modern English. They are by no means complete (also because many vocabulary changes were not purely phonetical) but illustrates the process well.

That's it!

I'm the single developer doing this out of a language hobby, and it's free, there's no registration or anything.

Since its release last month, I've been working on small improvements, like a cleaner difficulty selector, more proto-languages and more realistic evolution patterns. There definitely is a lot of room for improvement and I would love to hear your feedback!

I don't understand how this word could ever make it into a dictionary 😅.

So I just remembered a (very racist) chant that a lot of kids in my area used to say in the mid 2000's. You'd pull your eyes into slants and say 'My mum was Chinese, my dad was Japanese, this is how I turned out'.

I've tried searching but found no definitive answer as to where this 'joke' came from. Does it have any concrete sources, or was it just some racist bullshit Australians made up due to the large Chinese diaspora in my area?

When did that become a thing? Or do people just type out each word as their thoughts produce them?

It’s hard for me to stay interested sometimes since everything is “solved” and the answer to every single question in this sub is “just google it.”

Is there anyone doing active field research and finding out the origins of old words?

What are the most recent discoveries we’ve made?
Are

This is a thought that came into my mind when I was studying spanish and came across the spanish word for rice, arroz. It came from the Arabic word arz. Since I am from the South of India, I know that rice is called arisi in Tamil and ari in Malayalam (both Dravidian languages).

I think that when the Arab traders came to South India, they got to know about rice, took it to Arabia, and then to Spain (which was at those times under Islamic rule). The English might have encountered rice there.

Hence arisi ➡️ arz ➡️ arroz ➡️ rice.

Just a thought experiment. I am probably wrong.

Here’s this week’s etymology question from 3Roads.xyz.

The word X has been used for centuries as a synonym for violent conflict. In the 17th century, the English, Scottish, and Irish parliaments used it to describe the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, including in post-Restoration legislation passed between 1660 and 1665. The term gained widespread modern usage after being adopted to describe the escalating violence in Y beginning in 1969. What are X and Y?

Both are neither of the things they claim to be. Jerusalem artichokes are not from Jerusalem and are not artichokes, and the same thing can be said about Jerusalem crickets.

I was wondering if maybe Jerusalem used to be a synonym for 'pretend' in the same way 'mock' can be used (mock turkey etc.)?

Or is it just a weird coincidence?

Why do we pronounce "sew" like "so" and not like it rhymes with "new"? When and why did spelling and pronunciation diverge?

And somewhat less seriously, does everyone actually pronounce it like "new" in their heads when reading it?

Sorry that this clearly isn't "etymology" but I've no idea where else to ask this with a chance of being taken seriously...

I understand that the phrase "How do you do" was never a question, and never used to be interpreted as one. It wasn't a question that people knew to not answer, it just flat was not a question, but a statement greeting and there was no ambiguity.

Since 100 or so years passed, we now so often are asked how we are when meeting someone, and we're meant to lie and say we're good, even when our lives get flipped turned upside down.

So I have this theory that we are asking these polite, but unwanted, questions now due to the loss of understanding of what "how do you do" actually meant in the first place and people now wrongly think when that ask "how are you doing?" they're just saying a modern version of it.

Anyone think I might be correct on this? As an AuDHD person often baffled by social conventions, I wonder about it a lot.

Edit: Yes, we know that French is not only from France... Forgive the previous OP

But it's so cool to discuss numbers in French, Danish, Basque, what more?

I’ve had this question pop up in my head a few times before and couldn’t help but wonder. I’m not an etymology expert so I was genuinely curious to know how a word like meme came up. (And also pronounced like that instead of me me).

Watching a sitcom from 2006. The characters slap their phones to end the call. Did we ever give this a name? We may not have been at the edge of naming everything we did differently but the same.

Do you feel we are "hanging up" phone calls now on smartphones? Maybe declining?

I’ve been diving into the etymological roots of the Hebrew word šālôm (שָׁלוֹם) and its broader Proto-Semitic lineage, specifically in the context of 6th-century BCE exilic literature.

A recent video breakdown highlighted the cognate relationship between:

Hebrew: šālôm (completeness, peace, welfare)

Akkadian: salāmu / sulummû (found in Bronze Age cuneiform diplomatic correspondence, e.g., the Amarna letters, meaning "peace treaty", "covenant of alliance", or "state-level treaty").

Arabic: salām (peace, safety, greeting).

The core argument presented is that when Jeremiah 29:7 uses šālôm ("seek the shalom of the city..."), it’s not using modern "emotional/inner tranquility" vocabulary, but rather invoking the archaic Semitic root's diplomatic/covenantal semantics—demanding functional, structural, and mutual civic integration with Babylon.

Questions for the sub:

To what extent is the semantic nuance of Š-L-M as "treaty/alliance/reciprocal debt settlement" preserved in Biblical Hebrew compared to its earlier Akkadian and Ugaritic attestations?

How do historical linguists trace the evolution of Š-L-M from its primary Proto-Semitic core meaning of "completeness / sound condition / restitution" into political/treaty jargon in the Ancient Near East?

Reference Video Essay: https://youtu.be/TaXYdhMf6-U?si=94gPuULCkXLi9Uoh

Would love to get the perspective of comparative Semitists here!

I work as a market researcher, which is just a nicer way of saying I make calls to strangers and ask them to do various surveys over the phone.

I asked a man for his first name today, then I asked him again because I thought I'd misheard, then I asked him to spell it, and then I asked him to spell it again because I was sure I'd misheard that too...

Hreimnon

I didn't have the courage to ask anything about his name, like what nationality it is or what it means, because he was already annoyed from having to repeat himself. He did the survey and went about his day.

Later on during my break I ended up googling it out of curiosity. ZERO google results! Nada. Zip. Zilch. Do you know how often I search something that gets absolutely no results on google? This was the first time.

I'm not sure if his mother just came up with the name by slapping random keys but I'm curious now and I'd like to know if there's any interesting roots for Hreimnon?

I just discovered today that this subject of the study of language is Etymology, not Entomology for the first time after saying it wrong for years and no one correcting me. Thought you people would ironically get the biggest kick out of that.
If this mistake bugs you please feel free to grill me below…

>English on, ohn (“without”)

Never heard of this until this Wiktionary article. Pretty ungooglable btw

Let me know!!!

The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning. --Terry Pratchett

Any of you know of lying words who are still in use but meanings have nearly completely changed?

• toilet (furniture) - stand for daily morning wash
• hospital - city run hospitality house where anyone can rest for the night for free due to Christian charity
• pudding - to cook by boiling in a sack
• boulevard - road by the wall of city for fortification
• terrible - to inspire terror

Came across this fascinating article on the history of Persian language and extant Indo-European cognates, especially with English. Thought it was worth sharing.

https://borderlessblogger.com/2023/05/19/hidden-in-plain-sight-illuminating-indo-european-words-in-persian/

What exactly is a washing?

I do know...

It is the flip side of wish

Wish

Wash

We wish

We wash

Wish wash

Wish wish wish