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English is weird
oddtail:
--- Quote from: Akima on 24 Jan 2019, 03:09 ---
--- Quote from: oddtail on 24 Jan 2019, 01:17 ---like "chivalry" and "cavalry", which ultimately come from the same word - the French for "horse"
--- End quote ---
The French (cheval), Spanish (caballo), and Italian (cavallo) words for horse all derive from the Latin caballus.
--- End quote ---
That's true. Still, same source of both words, unlike "isle" vs "island", which is what I was trying to clumsily convey :-D
Cornelius:
I wonder if going a bit further, it might not come back to the same thing after all. Proto Indo-European is reconstructed as *ensla, wich might easily be construed as the same construction your proto-Germanic has, of combining water and land roots. That's just conjecture, though.
oddtail:
--- Quote from: Cornelius on 24 Jan 2019, 03:37 ---I wonder if going a bit further, it might not come back to the same thing after all. Proto Indo-European is reconstructed as *ensla, wich might easily be construed as the same construction your proto-Germanic has, of combining water and land roots. That's just conjecture, though.
--- End quote ---
Possibly, but if we go that far back, it becomes near-irrelevant, and the fact that the words that diverged so much ended up sounding almost exactly the same would still be a complete coincidence.
LTK:
It's not that uncommon, actually. See the wikipedia article on false cognates. Similarly, the colour orange and the Dutch royal family name Orange are completely unrelated etymologically, but as a result we still have orange as our national colour.
oddtail:
--- Quote from: LTK on 24 Jan 2019, 04:38 ---It's not that uncommon, actually. See the wikipedia article on false cognates.
--- End quote ---
Thanks for the link, those are pretty fun. Not as extreme examples as isle/island IMO, but fun nonetheless.
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