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Did you know the word “merry” is related to the words “bra” and “pretzel”? Well now you do. A quick rundown of each of these words:

Although these days its pretty localised to the holiday season, “merry” used to be a fairly general word meaning “happy” or “pleasant”. It comes from a Proto-Germanic word which meant “brief”, but also “slow”, and “leisurely”. That final meaning probably took over, and gradually evolved to the meaning we have today.

”Brief” is from the Latin “brevis”, meaning “short” or “brief”. Embrace

”Embrace” comes from an unattested Latin word *imbracchiāre, which literally meant “to take into your arms”.

”Brace” has many meanings today, mostly related to supporting something, but its oldest meaning is as a piece of armour that protects the arm. The word simply comes from the Old French for “arm”.

”bra” actually comes from the same source as “brace”. It is of course short for brassiere, which is from a French word that means “child’s vest”, “lifejacket”, and (now localised to Quebec), “bra”. This is from an Old French word that referred to the padding used inside armour that covered the arms and armpits.

And “pretzel” is borrowed unchanged from the dialectal form of the German “Brezel”. Brezel and pretzel both come from a Latin word which referred to a pastry with a twisted shape reminiscent of folded arms (now called a bracciatello in parts of Italy). Those last 4 words all derive from the Latin word for “arm”, which comes from an Ancient Greek word for the upper arm. This can be further traced to the Ancient Greek word for “short”, linking these 4 words with the related Latin and Germanic words for “short/brief”, and connecting all 6 words as unlikely cousins.

The post Unexpected doublets: how “merry”, “bra”, and “pretzel” are related appeared first on Starkey Comics.

Red, green, grey and brown just evolved fairly simply from Proto-Indo-European colour names, with their meanings unchanged in the last 6000 or so years of evolution. The only twist being that “green” and “grey” seem to be from the same root.. There is no clear explanation for this, although something similar seems to have happened in ancient Celtic languages (e.g. Old Irish “glas” meant both “green” and “grey”). English “grow” is also from this root.

White, yellow, and black all appear to come from different words that meant “shine”. It’s unclear why PIE had so many words for shine, although probably they had slightly different meanings.

Yellow is distantly related to English “gold”, and possibly “glow”. It’s origin may have meant the shine of gold. White is related to words for “white”, “clear”, and “light” in several other languages, and its root may have meant the shine of sunlight.

Black comes from a word that meant “burnt”, which may be from a PIE root meaning “shine (like a flame)” and “burn”. This would make it related to “blank” and “blink”, as well as the words for “white” in many other European languages. Those are all the main colour words that English inherited directly from Old English: now we get into borrowings.

Blue is a borrowing from Old French, which itself borrowed the word (possibly so early that it was still a Latin dialect) from Frankish. Frankish was a Germanic language, and it actually had a cousin in Old English: blāw, which was replaced with the French borrowing. The PIE root for this word meant “yellow” or “blonde”, and how it shifted to mean “blue” in the Germanic languages is unknown. Going even further back, “blue” is connected to “black” via an early root that meant “to shine”.

Purple is a rare colour in nature, so no surprise this one is also a borrowing. It ultimately comes from the Greek name for Hexaplex trunculus, a type of sea snail whose secretions were used to make purple dye in the ancient Mediterranean. This name displaced the native Old English “godwebben”, with “godwebb” literally meaning “god web”, a name for an exquisite piece of clothing. Which makes sense, since purple was the most valuable dye.

And finally we have “orange”, the most recent of these words to join English, first being recorded as the name for a colour in 1502. Before that time, this colour wasn’t considered common or distinct enough to have its own name, and it was simply called “yellow-red” (“ġeolurēad” in Old English). The name of the colour is derived from the fruit, not vice versa as you may assume. Both the fruit and its name reached us via trade from its native range in southern India, passing through a string of languages on its way.

Bonus: “pink” is likely derived from the pink (Dianthus plumarius), a flower. The etymology of the flower is unknown, so I missed it out of this image. -

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