Submitted by OfficialWireGrind t3_zs48my in dataisbeautiful
Zoloch t1_j18l3js wrote
Reply to comment by fogindex in [OC] English Words of Spanish Origin and the Number of Mentions in Wikipedia by OfficialWireGrind
By your standards no word is of any origin. There is always a prior language from where a words comes. So by this, English doesn’t have words of French origin, because most of them come from Latin (some from Germanic , or Gaulish) which come from Italic, which come from Ítalo-Celtic, which come from Indo-European which come from whatever prior language etc. the same for Arabic words, or any other language’s words, which come from previous or adjacent languages from where they took them. So, “beauty”, according to your reasoning, is not a word of French origin (beauté) but of pre-pre-pre Indo European origin, isn’t it? And French didn’t have anything to do with it.
Those words come from Spanish as it is the language that took them and transformed them and made them evolve with its own idiosyncrasy, its own sounds and its own ways, and from which English took them. As examples of the words in the post, Potato comes from Spanish “patata” (a mixture of two words, one from Quechua “papa” and other from Taino “batata”), Adobe is from Arab Al-tub which come from Egyptian “dbt”. And this from where? Chocolate from Nahuatl “Xocoalt”. Similar, but not the same, and if English had taken them directly from those languages they would be very different as they are now in English. And at the same time, those words undoubtedly come from other languages prior to them or in contact with them. And so on.
So, the words in the post come from Spanish, that’s how it works in philological terms.
And by the way: Platinum comes directly from Spanish “Platino”, not the other way around. Romans didn’t know the metal as it was identified and described in 1735, and given the name for its similarity to Silver…”plata” in Spanish (Latin: “argentum”). Platinum is a latinization of Platino, not the opposite
And Canyon is veeeeery used in Spain. Its geography is full of “cañones” (“cañón” is phonetically pronounced “canyon”). Not as big as the Grand Canyon, that’s why the Spaniard that saw it for the first time as a European called it Gran Cañón, as he had seen many (smaller) in his homeland
https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ca%C3%B1%C3%B3n_de_A%C3%B1isclo
fufo1298 t1_j1aeqr8 wrote
Great explanation. Thx
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