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se munuc and se circolwyrde
Grimm's and Verner's Laws
Grimm's and Verner's Law
From: aalcaraz, 2 minutes ago
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ReplyDeleteA very interesting book, indeed. And the title couldn’t be better chosen, since the life of words can certainly be labelled as secret, if nothing else. Words evolve in such a way that they sweep away their past, and it is only if one is interested in etymology that we discover their origins.
ReplyDeleteTracing back their history, one gets to unimaginable results which seem perfectly regular and logical nonetheless! I don't know in your cases, but I've always been amazed by words origins, especially after having studied Greek and Latin.
The immersion of oneself into the evolution of words provides you with tremendous insight into the different conceptions of the world throughout history, the results yielded because of contact between different peoples, etc.
But what I personally enjoy most is realizing that languages which seem to be incredibly distant actually share the same ancestor! (Man, how thrilling can that be??). Besides, you can perfectly see how the same word followed a complete different path in each language (c.f. English 'see' and Spanish 'seguir'). And why so? Well, that's another most interesting issue!