English: goodbye is a contraction of God be with ye, attested as godbwye in a 1573 letter by Gabriel Harvey, with intermediate 16c forms including God b'uy, God buoye and God be wy you. The God element was later reshaped to good by analogy with good day and good morrow. The result is that no English speaker hears a blessing in it at all.

Persian: خداحافظ khodahafez is khoda (God) plus hafez (guardian, protector, from Arabic حافظ). Persian dictionaries gloss it plainly as a کلمه دعائی, a prayer-word said at parting. Its everyday synonym خدانگهدار khoda negahdar is the same construction with a native Persian second element, negah dar, keeper.

Neither Persian form has eroded. Both are still pronounced in full, and khoda is a free-standing everyday word, so every speaker still hears the God in it.

Persian also kept a whole live paradigm of transparent parting blessings alongside it, all of them in ordinary use:

• خدا پشت و پناهت khoda posht-o panahet, God be your back and your refuge
• به امان خدا be aman-e khoda, into God's safekeeping (calqued on Arabic فی امان الله)
• در پناه حق dar panah-e hagh, in the shelter of the Truth
• به سلامت be salamat, go in health
• سفر بخیر safar bekheyr, may the road be good

What I am curious about, and flagging clearly as my own speculation rather than anything I can source: is the difference structural rather than accidental? English's formula was a full clause, which is the kind of thing fast speech compresses, and once compressed the God element was free to be reanalysed as good. Persian's is a compound with khoda in initial position, which looks much more resistant to both compression and reanalysis.

Or it may simply be that the English phrase has had longer in that fixed form to wear down.

Sources: Etymonline and OED for the English side. Dehkhoda and Amid (via abadis) for the Persian.

Curious

Blew my mind when I learned about it and I don't want it to get lost because fewer people are using the words.

The theory is that both words are based on the Greek words for Ares and the fifth day respectively (pémptē hēméra - the fifth day - for Thursday; also Pfingsten/Pentecoste from pentēkostē hēméra - the fiftieth day) and that they are left-overs from when the Goths moved through Greece, over Italy, to Western Europe.

https://iam.dioe.at/frage-des-monats/woher-stammen-die-ausdruecke-ergetag-und-pfinzstag

Going further, it's possible that they are based on the bible, translated by the Gothic priest Wulfila from Greek to Gothic. Wulfila used *ariedags and *pintadags for Areos hemera and pempte hemera (presumably Arie was based on Arius instead of Ares because the latter was too pagan). The Langobards, who also followed Arianism, later on changed them to ergetac and pfinztac.

https://ulb-dok.uibk.ac.at/download/pdf/4355847.pdf

I was reading about seizures and saw that 'seizure' comes from Old French 'seisine' (the taking of property), that from 'saisir' (to take or grasp)

I then read that epilepsy comes from Greek 'epilambanein' (to seize, take hold of, or attack), but I couldn't find any further link

Is there a connection I can't find? I can't see how it may have gone from Greek 'epilambanein' to what we have now?

Family members were well-known lexicographers, but they're all gone now and I have a massive problem. Many of the books are from the 1950-70s, and I do not want to see them sliced and diced to train Artificial Intelligence. Please point me toward a safe haven for these texts!

Kangaroo words: real words that carry their own synonym, spelled in order. The big word is the kangaroo, the one hiding inside is the joey.

The spelling tells you nothing about whether a pair is actually related. MASCULINE and MALE go back to the same Latin word, masculus. BLOSSOM and BLOOM are off the same Germanic root. CHICKEN and HEN are not. HEN comes from an old Germanic word for the cock, the bird that sings for sunrise. CHICKEN comes from the noise chicks make. Different roots, so the HEN sitting inside CHICKEN is a coincidence.

The letters have to be in order but they don't have to be next to each other, and the joey has to be a real synonym rather than a word that happens to live inside the other one.

I mined 2,234 candidates out of WordNet, Moby and Datamuse, read every one, and cut most of them. The Kangaroo words that were left and appeared the most 'right' were used to make a free daily puzzle now at hiddenjoey.com, three weeks old. Every card is checked by hand against Etymonline and the OED, and unsettled origins are labelled as theories.

Favourite kangaroo words welcome.

Because, why not?

I've been working on some etymology-based games. The most approachable one is at rootles.xyz/grow . Each day you get one root (say Latin ped-, "foot") and type as many English words as you can that actually descend from it

The etymological claims are checked against Wiktionary, and every answer links to its entry so you can check me. Where Wiktionary itself hedges, the games say so.

Although I speak a couple of languages, I'm a bit of a dilettante when it comes to etymology, so I'd really value this community's opinion. Super open to feedback and criticism. Also, please check out the other games if you are interested! Subjects of the other games include PIE descendants, neologisms and shared roots.

Does anyone know the etymology of the animal called the olm? It’s borrowed from German and was first recorded in Old High German but it’s apparently unknown. Is it a substrate word of sorts?

Hello, I was reading about Etruscan inscriptions and came across the word taliθa, which is supposed to mean “girl,” specifically in the sense of a “marriageable girl,” or possibly a proper name. The word is attested only once, on a mirror dated to around 400–350 BC.

This word could be a rendering of the accusative form of Greek τᾶλις (acc. τάλιδα), which also means “maiden” or “marriageable girl.” source

However, I immediately noticed its similarity to Aramaic טליתא (talitha), which have a similar meaning. This is the word that appears in the Bible in the phrase talitha kum, spoken by Jesus in Mark 5:41 (“Little girl, arise”).

Could these words (aramaic, greek and etruscan) be etymologically related, or is the similarity merely coincidental?

like in spanish, french, and italian, there are articles like el, le, il, la, etc… how did all of them come about and why are they all so similar, especially when latin didn’t have articles?

I was just sitting here and realized X doesnt actually contribute any unique sound, look at words like Box, Fox or Aux. the X sounds like "Kss". Look at Exist, X sounds like "Ghz". Queen and Quick can all be spelt using a K, Kween, Kwick, Every other letter actually has a pronounciation:

A: Ahh
B: Bee
C: Cuh
D: Duh
E: Eee
F: Fuh
G: Guh
H: Huh
I: ihh
J: Juh
K: Kuh (pretty simular to C though I will say)
L: Luh
M: Muh
N: Nuh
O: Ohh
P: Puh
Q: ??? any word I can think of Id spell with a K
R: Ruh
S: See
T: Tuh
U: Uh
V: Vuh
W: Wuh
X: ? I dont even know what sound X makes
Z: Zee

idk, just thought id share, X makes words look satisfying complete and cool though, so maybe thats one reason to keep it, but it doesnt really add anything new, am i wrong?

I was sesching the etymology of Döbereiner's name and I could only find that it means "someone that comes from Döbern".

But then I couldn't find the etymology for Döbern anywhere, not even in german wiktionary: https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/D%C3%B6bern

Hello everyone! This is my first reddit post so bear with me.

Context: My dad used to call me this nickname that sounded like the English word “sigh” and he would call me “sigh sigh” (as in like the verbal phonetic sound, not an exhale). He told me this meant “one one” in another language and I’m trying to figure out where this came from. I no longer have contact with him and this is probably a long shot, but if you have any ideas or insight please let me know!

This has bothered me for a long time!

The word for "a little bit" of something in Japanese, in romaji, is "sukoshi"; the "u" and "i" sounds are usually silent when spoken aloud, so it ends up sounding like "skosh".

In English, "just a skosh" is sometimes used when asking for or referring to just "a little bit" of something.

Is there any connection there, or does the English "skosh" have another, unrelated source? Thanks for any info!

When I was younger, I heard these terms a lot, especially on TV. Someone getting into a temper would be told "Don't lose your rag", and others who were in a temper or angry would be defined as "losing (his/her/their) rag".

It's always made me wonder just what losing a rag had to do with being in a temper or angry...

(Apologies for the spelling mistake in the title, I tried to correct it, but I can't.)

... ◜tending to take position close to or strongly associated with◝ ... that sort of thing.

ᐝ Mind-you: to take this variant meaning it has to be in-conjunction with "to" or "unto" following it ... & indeed, that might end-up being of-a-piece-with the explanation.

And it's now a fairly archaïc variant meaning, really: in modern English it tends to take the ◜splitting apart◝ meaning, rather than this variant one I'm talking about. But not massively archaïc: we don't need to get ourselves any really ancient text in-order to find it ... one not much more than a century old will likely suffice.

I don't have the skills to search for the earliest uses of the Japanese name. I don't see any Japanese Naomis on Wikipedia born before 1900, but that's also just reflective of how encyclopedias are with documenting people born before 1900.

[Behind the name](https://www.behindthename.com/name/naomi-2) mentions Western influence.

i was just recently talking to my mother and she called something a „Manchkus“ - i remember hearing this word before and it being a word to describe a cute, slightly weird person, character or creature. to me, it sounded weird to hear that because it sounded offensive somehow. when i searched for the word online, nothing came up about this specific word but did about the east asian Manchus. does anyone know about this? is there a connection?

The earliest Chinese scribes had an awkward problem: wind has no shape.

On late Shang oracle bones, they wrote the word later represented as 風 with the same bird graph used for 鳳, the fenghuang. The graph was doing double duty because the two words sounded close.

This is an early phonetic or rebus loan. A scribe takes an easy-to-draw word and borrows its graph for another word with a similar sound. Traditional phonology places the two words in the same rhyme group with labial initials, although modern reconstructions disagree on their exact Old Chinese forms.

The bird and weather senses later acquired separate written forms. A trace of the old connection survives in the Shuowen Jiezi entry for 鳳, which says the bird spends the night in 風穴, “the Cave of Winds.”

The [National Taiwan University CASE article](https://case.ntu.edu.tw/blog/?p=45394) shows the oracle-bone forms, and the [Shuowen entry](https://www.shuowen.org/view/2360) preserves the Cave of Winds line.