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You might also enjoy reading about an old observation on the etymological dichotomy of animal and meat names in English. A French friend once observed that learning French vocabulary can be problematic for the Anglophone because some French words which look (almost) identical to English ones today have rather different meanings. My French has much withered away over the decades, so I am at a loss for a good example. Perhaps "maintenant" will do. It means "now" and is only distantly related to the word "maintenance." I suppose "maintaining" something is the act of trying to keep things as they are "now," so one can understand how the words diverged in meaning over the centuries. For fun, one can also split "maintenant" into the French words "main" and "tenant" and come up with "hand holding," or as we say in English "at hand," which gives us the hint it means "now." Last edited by FanDeAliFee; 01-23-2010 at 02:43 AM.. Reason: link to cited language-affinity-metric paper |
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