Draco Feb

Early Latin borrowings: construction

Words such as museum, formula and ratio instantly give away their Latin origin, but did you know wall, street, and kitchen come from Latin too? They were borrowed during the Roman occupation of the part of Europe where Proto-West Germanic was spoken, the ancestor of English and its West Germanic sister languages.

Today’s infographic about construction terms shows six of these early borrowings and their descendants in English, Dutch, and German. Next time: food words.

Early Latin borrowings: utensils

Over the past few days, I’ve created two infographics on early Germanic loanwords from Latin: one on construction, with words such as kitchen and street, and one on food, with cheese, butter and others.

Today, I’m wrapping up the trilogy with an infographic on utensils. Fork, pan, sack, mint and chest – they were all borrowed into Proto-West Germanic, the ancestor of English, when the Romans controlled large parts of north-western Europe during the early first millennium AD.

My paleo pride series to date! All the pride stuff with prehistoric fauna I’ve come across was exclusively dinosaurs, so I wanted to include some less popular taxa.

Unexpected cognates

The word town shares its origin with German Zaun (‘fence’) and Dutch tuin (‘garden’), even though their forms and meanings are quite different. They all stem form Proto-Germanic *tūnan, whose meaning is reconstructed as ‘fenced area’. Over the course of 2000 years, they’ve grown apart.

My new graphic shows nine unexpected but true cognates in English, German, Dutch, Frisian, and Swedish.

When BarleyTheBurr (Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Bluesky, Instagram) started streaming Tomodachi Life for the first time, they made a Mii that represented chat. Chat chose to be a tall, curvy, non binary, goth, dommy mommy, witch. When Barley introduced Chat's Mii to Bandit's Mii, they ended up flirting with eachother. So of course I had to draw them in the kabedon pose XD.

Is the name of this language group Finno-Ugric or Ugro-Finnic?

When ''Victory Day'' is celebrated across Europe

I wanted to shake off the art rust by doing an artistic rendition of this image of a ferret in a turtleneck I saw in my feed.

Probly haplogy

Probably is often pronounced /probly/. The syllable ba is deleted because it’s followed by another syllable starting with a b. This is called haplology – or haplogy if you will.

Some people have an issue with /probly/, but what they don’t know is that their beloved form probably is the result of haplology too: in Middle English, it was probablely: probable + ly. The part le was lost because it was followed by ly.

Haplology can be found in all ages and places. My new infographic shows cases from English, Latin, French, Greek, German, and Portuguese.