I love to learn the flow and mutations that words undergo while traversing between languages and marinating within them.
Do you know of any words or phrases that have had interesting and unique pathways through their lexicons, or root words that have diverged in meaning after one language split into two, or when they were borrowed from one language to another?
A couple of favorites of mine:
We track the English word "orange" all the way back to the Sanskrit word "naranj" - a name for the same fruit. This word follows the trade routes that these fruits would take Westward, all the way to Spanish "naranja". Spanish traders spread these fruits to England, where "a narange" became "an orange"!
My favorite part of this etymology is that it flowed backward! The Portuguese were also in the citrus trade, and eventually sweeter breeds of citrus bred and grown West of the Middle East was traded along the same routes. As a result, the Middle Eastern peoples who traded the Naranj westward to the Portuguese, eventually had the sweeter orange citrus sold to them many years later from the direction they had previously sold to, and as a result, these cultures have a word for the sour orange citrus "Naranj" as well as the sweet orange citrus named after the region it was traded from, the "Portakal" fruit. (Spelling may vary by region/language)
The Turkey is a bird that is indigenous to the American continents, so why is it that its' name is derived from the name of an old world country - Turkey? It turns out that another bird was previously given this name - now called guinea fowl (also named after a place of origin!) - the birds were originally called "turkey birds" or "turkeys" after the Turkish traders that were exchanging them with the English. When the Europeans sailed to the Americas, birds were found there that resembled what they had been calling turkeys - the name stuck for the American birds, but not for the ones that had been sold by the Turkish.
There is again a fun wrinkle to this story! A Turkish colleague tells me that the Turkish language names the guinea fowl also after the region they would trade it from - "afrika tavuğu" or Africa Chickens!
i find the etymology of toxic rly interesting :3
it comes through latin and french from the greek phrase τοξικόν φάρμακον (toxikon pharmakon, poison for use on arrows), from τοξικός (toxikos, pertaining to arrows or archery), from τόξον (toxon, bow)
my guess is [1] that the people speaking latin heard the phrase toxikon pharmakon used for poison on arrows, incorrectly assumed that toxikon was the word for poison, and borrowed it into their language like that. so now the word toxic comes from archery words :D
the actual word for poison, pharmakon, also has the meaning of "drug, medicine" and its where all the pharma- words come from :3
this is very much a guess but i feel like its the most reasonable explanation of what happened ? tell me if im wrong mrrow :3 ↩︎
ohh a favorite topic of mine!! my favorite etymology is pie
reverend (phd) (+ 3 other doctorates) walter william skeat gave it in a few steps, all in english
how cute is that!!
In my past deep-dives into certain foods' histories, one of the things that has struck me has been the difference in how differently the concept of "medicine" has been handled across different periods of time - I like this as an example! It makes me wonder if the concept of a "pharmakon" was simply any substance that appeared to modify the health of a person, in a similar way to how we use "drug" to refer to both substances perceived as medicine but as also as recreational psychoactive substances, but even broader to include poisons and maybe other things like irritants?
I think this may have just become my favorite etymology as well 
It makes me wonder if a "mudpie" made by children at play is not originally just after it being an attempt at imitating cooking, but an earlier term meaning "a jumble of mud"
Also, it's pretty funny that with all of this in mind, there is such a baking implement as a pie bird! At some point we came full circle with pies and didn't even realize it 
this is kinda interesting actually because theres a very clear distinction in russian, so when i saw drug used for both in english i was, , confused smfdnmsdfnsmdfn
(edit) also, from the wiktionary page on pharmakon, its meanings are:
the potion/charm/spell and dye/color meanings are kinda interesting :3 [1]
but im too eepy to think more about them rn, , ↩︎
In English there is a more contextual distinction separating the ideas of recreational drugs and pharmaceutical ones - in my experience, an English speaker will hear the word "drug" with no context and presume that a recreational drug is being discussed. Pharmaceutical drugs are more context-dependent - you may discuss a "drug store" or similar, but the phrase "medicine" is usually preferred when referring to them in a general way.
Something to know about English (you may indeed already know) - the English lexicon is notably very large relative to most other languages. It's hard to pin down how many words exist in a language/how many are commonly used, but the length of the Oxford dictionary is around 600,000 words compared to e.g. the Russian dictionaries which I've seen estimated to have about 150,000 words. Dictionary lengths are an imperfect measure of word count of course, but the story is nonetheless telling. Compared to languages where it may be common to have words with many meanings, in English you may also see meanings with many words. (Of course, all languages have both of these things.)
This comes to mind when I think about medicine/drugs - there are a host of other words that might take their place which would mean the same thing/something very similar, but with a different context or feeling (pulling these from a thesaurus): remedy, treatment, cure, therapy, agent - with more usage-specific, slang, antiquated, or poetic terms also existing: elixir, nostrum, tonic, narcotic (straddling the line between our two meanings of "drug",) panacea, and many others. We also apparently have the word "pharmacon!" (Although I have never seen this used and suspect it's a very outdated term.)
This makes me wonder if the original meaning was something more to the effect of "a useful biological agent" or "something useful extracted from a plant" which came to inhabit a meaning related to the host of different purposes that plant extracts had in the technologies of the time.
I want to quickly reply to my own post here to address something that might be taken away from it - I've heard people say that English is "more expressive" due to its' large word count, which is not true; Languages have had beautiful and expressive poetry and prose since they have existed, relying on other features of their language than an English speaker might use. A large bank of words to rely on is undoubtedly a tool in the belt of a writer, but it is also far from the only one.
the questions are like, , rhetorical but if you have an answer thats also awesome :3 also holy shit i just realized why rhetorical questions are called that smdnfsmdnfdsm
now im kinda curious about word counts and stuf,, i feel like russian has a lot of similar words so does that mean that the "actual number of unique words" [1] is even lower in russian?
for example, бежать, прибежать, убежать, сбежать, отбежать, подбежать, перебежать, забежать, вбежать (+ all of these with ж replaced with г) are all words that mean similar things, all related to running, and theyre all separate entries in a dictionary
they kinda correspond to english phrasal verbs sometimes: убежать - to run away, подбежать - to run up to. but not always. and since you can make a lot of similar words like this from almost every verb, you kinda get 20 verbs per verb ? like thats way more than there are phrasal verbs in english,, does that mean there are way fewer roots in russian than english (significantly fewer than the 1/4 that you might expect from just looking at the dictionary sizes)?
yeah i agree ! even toki pona is rly expressive in some ways and it has like ,, wayy fewer words
toki pona words are very vague but that means that theyre, , broad and one word can mean soo much . thats kinda awesome actually i havent thought about it like that before :3
is this even like a thing ? does this make sense? idk ↩︎
extremely long meditation on this topic to follow:
This is an interesting thing to discuss and is one of the reasons why dictionary word counts are imprecise.
The answer to your question has something to do with the semantic arrangements of the two languages - English is an "analytic" language, meaning that semantic units (i.e. individual units of meaning) are separated into individual words which are arranged to form the full meaning of a phrase. Russian is a "fusional" language, meaning that a single word stem tends to have prefixes and suffixes attached to it which carry the same units of meaning which might be entirely separate words.
Latin is also fusional, and is a language that I am personally more familiar with, so I will take my example from there. Latin words tend to be describable with a table of conjugations rather than a single one. A single Latin word, especially a verb, in a dictionary can take up a full page of tables describing the way that the verb stem is modified by different semantic units that are "fused" onto it, giving it contextual meaning within a sentence.
Let's look at the word "to write," or "scribere":
For a given verb, you have singular/plural, 1st/2nd/3rd person, 6 possible tenses, indicative/subjunctive moods, and active/passive - to find the written version of the word, you can basically check a table to find the conjugation of the word you're looking for. In addition to this, there are infinitives (infinitive "scribere" -> "to write", as compared to "scribo" -> "I write") as well as gerunds which treat the verb as a noun with singular noun conjugations (e.g. "scribendi" or "of writing"), imperatives, supines, participles (treating the verb as an adjective, e.g. "homo scriptus" -> "the writing man") and gerundives (another form of adjective, this one a sort of future passive e.g. "historia scribenda" -> "the history is to be written").
You can see how, in a language like this, you need a large number of conjugations to really understand how to use a word. In English, you might have two or three (for a verb this could look like a past tense form "wrote" and a continuous/noun/adjective form "writing" and a past participle form "written") and some prefixes/suffixes (e.g. "underwrite") and then you add marker words around the word to contextualize how it is to be understood.
So we arrive at this sense that a Russian or Latin dictionary would be different from an English one - in order to completely understand how to use a word in a fusional language, you need to understand all of the ways that it can be modified - in English, you just need the stem and a couple of modifications and you can work around that.
So, in some sense, if you compare the verb inventories of Russian and English, you might see fewer in Russian! But this is further complicated by how English conjugates its own verbs - many English verbs are prefixed versions, and there are many optional prefixes to be had in English which may or may not appear in a dictionary but would be instantly understandable to a fluent speaker/reader ("prewrite", "underwrite", "unwritten", "miswritten", "rewrite", "interwrite", etc.) and, while not modifying the stem or being required in the way pre/suffixes work in fusional languages, these could themselves bulk out the dictionary of English quite a lot, since adding a single verb may also naturally add a whole bunch of prefixed versions.
I hadn't actually heard of Toki Pona before I joined this website, but I want to look into it more! It seems like a beautiful project!
yeah ! thats interesting :3
i ,, dont think i have anything else to add to that,
i do, however, have an infodump about toki pona >:3
toki pona words are very vague. for example, the word toki can mean language, speech, communication, to talk, etc., so basically anything communication-related. importantly, theyre not ambiguous, just vague - toki doesnt sometimes mean language and sometimes speech, it indicates the broad concept of communication
the way you say anything more specific is by describing it. toki pona doesnt use set phrases, like some youtube videos about toki pona might lead you to believe, you specifically describe things, and usually you describe the qualities that are most important in context. a few examples:
the fact that you have to describe things has a lot of cool consequenses !
i also rly like it when toki pona's vagueness is like, , better than english's precision. for example, ive tried to describe shell texturing in toki pona. its an algorithm for rendering stuff like grass, fur etc.. in english i have to say "grass, fur, etc.", but in toki pona theres one word for that: linja (long, flexible object). and like Yes thats exactly what it is, its a long flexible object, it doesnt matter specifically what it is, just that its long and flexible
another example is the usage of the word "len" (cloth, clothing, concealment, hidden, hide, secret) in the song mi la mi mi ala. its used for both clothes and hiding (like hiding the trans identity) and sometimes it can mean both at the same time and like ,, idk how to describe it properly but its soo awesome msdnfmsndf . (edit edit) ok a better way to say this is like . a very big part of the broad meaning of len fits the context, so it can be translated into english as both "clothes" and "hiding". so len fits that context rly rly well and its awesome,
and you may think that toki pona would be very limited (thats what Sonja Lang, the creator of toki pona used to think actually ) and you wouldnt be able to talk about stuff like math, but that not the case ! like ive watched and understood a video about non-euclidean geometry, and ive heard that someone learned about derivatives in toki pona :3
if you wanna learn:
i learned most of it here: https://lipu-sona.pona.la/
ive seen this recommended, it seems good i think ! https://lipu-sona.comforttiger.space/en/introduction
theres also this rly new course, Sonja Lang said its good mrrow https://wasona.com/
theres links to like a lot more stuff on https://tokipona.org
(edit) fun fact "toki pona" can mean "therapy" because its like,, improvement talk
Thanks so much! toki pona li pona lukin, li ante pona mute, li suli jan olin e mi.
I've found myself working my way up through the pages of lipu sona pona - there are all of the difficulties of learning new vocabulary (I have always struggled with acquiring words in new languages) but I'm already amazed at how much I can comprehend.
The vagueness is interesting - I think I'll have to sit with it some. I do find myself misunderstanding some of what I read on first translation, but maybe that's an issue of using a high-context language without any context I am enjoying the process of figuring out how to put words together bit by bit and construct something meaningful.
Fitting my previous post into this one, toki pona is extremely analytical (like English but moreso) - there is no conjugation, all semantic meanings are contained within one packet of sound that doesn't change when it is e.g. made plural or otherwise. In that way, words can be sorta piled onto each other to construct new meanings e.g. "jan lili" -> child as opposed to simply "small person."
In that way, it makes sense that complex ideas can be expressed - as long as there is a sufficient inventory of words (~120?) and an appropriately permissive ruleset, meanings can be combined in numerous ways (I can construct "mi moku e pan jelo linja noka ko kili loje namako" and you'll probably catch my meaning) and from there you can get pretty far with appropriate context.
It'd be interesting to learn something new in Toki Pona! I'm not sure if or when I'd use it but that almost makes me want to learn it more
yay ! im glad youre enjoing it :3
something that helped me with vocab is learning sitelen pona :3. sitelen pona is the second most popular way of writing toki pona (after sitelen Lasina, the latin alphabet), it maps every word to a glyph [1] and i found the glyphs rly easy to remember :3
i used this video series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uze2LKVN-2E&list=PLGgN3ddGVj6EAZ-tCFreNF1hY0rlL8yzZ
another thing you can do for vocab is read about the origin of the word on https://linku.la or https://nimi.li. most of the words are borrowed from other languages, so if you know the word in the language of origin, its easier to remember in toki pona :3 (i happen to know english, russian, and a bit of dutch, which is where a lot of the words come from, so it may be more effective for me than you, but it can still help i think )
nimi.li also has detailed explanations of the words' semantic spaces which is very very helpful i think !
yeah , toki pona can be hard to understand, especially without context, especially especially for a beginner, ,
i recommend jan Telakoman's o pilin e toki pona series - its made to teach toki pona through comprehensible input, so its great practice for beginners :3
you can ! im reading jan Lipamanka's blog on food chemistry and, , yeah ! learning ! idk what else to say mdsnffmdsfdms
i found the first entry a lot harder to understand than the second, so if you struggle to understand the first, you can try skipping it
[2]
my interpretation of this is "toki pona looks(/seems?) good, is very different in a good way, and ???"
toki pona is very literal, so "toki pona li pona lukin" means "toki pona looks good" as in "toki pona is visually pleasing". if thats what you meant then ,, yeah ! thats how you say it. if you meant something closer to "toki pona seems good", you need to think about what "seems" actually means. to me, it doesnt rly mean anything important, so id just say "toki pona li pona.", but that may be different for you :3
ante pona mute is a rly good phrase i like it :3
im ,, not sure what you meant by "toki pona li suli jan olin e mi". the literal translation is "toki pona bigs me humanly and lovingly". my only idea is something like "im a big fan of toki pona", which would be (for example,) "mi jan olin [3] pi toki pona" [4] but you already kinda said that so idk
i do catch your meaning ("spaghetti with a red kili sauce" ? no idea what noka does there sdmfnmsdfn) but in a real text, big noun phrases like this are very very hard to read. its better to get rid of a few words, or separate it into 2 sentences. id personally say "pan linja pi ko kili" or "pan linja pi ko kili loje" depending on how important the loje is. also ,, you need pi there, the lipu sona chapter on pi explains it better than i can probably,
i dont know the proper linguistic terms for this, , ↩︎
im like always worrying that when giving feedback like this its gonna come off as critisizing or something so like, , please tell me if this is the case or/and you dont want me to do this awawawawa ↩︎
note that olin is more about emotional connection than liking something a lot. u can read more on nimi.li :3 ↩︎
"im a something-person" is not a very toki pona way of saying something, its usually better to say "i do something". so for "im a big fan of toki pona" its better to say something like "i like toki pona a lot", or "i have an emotional connection with toki pona" if you wanna use olin ↩︎
I'm learning that bit by bit! The ideograms really help, although it's a little easier for me to access sitelen Lasina just because that's how my keyboard works 
I'm in a discord "ma pona pi toki pona" also which has channels that are toki pona only! It really helps to just talk to people in the language; ona ale li pana sona mute e mi. ni tomo la mi jo e kulupu sin.
And how appropriate for this thread, too! nimi tan pi toki pona!
sina awen e pakala mute mi! pona tawa sina a
I'm still making a lot of mistakes but I'm improving 
In my case, "toki pona li suli jan olin e mi" was intended to say "toki pona grows my humanity and love" but I see the grammatical mistakes now that I'm beginning to understand nasin pi toki pona a little better. Likewise with my spaghetti description I'm learning to keep my descriptions a bit simpler and work my way up through context.
Edit: I'm sure I have made more mistakes in this post, I appreciate your patience
700 word wall of text again how do i keep doing this smdfnsmdfnmsndf
yeahh typing sitelen pona is . certainly a thing. theres a bot in ma pona that can generate sitelen pona images from your text, and there are unicode characters but theyre only supported by a few fonts, and you need a way to actually type them (theres an espanso package and a keyboard layout i thin k). typing sitelen Lasina is definitely easier yeah ,,
im also there mrrow ! but im very inactive because talking in big servers is hard for me,, . might try to talk in a toki pona taso channel at some point but idk,
sina pona a! tenpo pini pi suno luka wan la sina sona ala e toki pona. suno luka wan li tenpo lili a !
toki sina mute la mi sona e ni: sina toki e seme? ni la sona sina li pona
literal translation:
you good! in the past time of three days, you do not know toki pona. three days is a small time! a lot of the time i know this: you are talking about what? because of this, your knowledge is good
what id say in english:
youve only been learning for like,, 3 days ? you can already say mostly understandable things :3 thats impressive i think ! (i mostly understood everything u said in toki pona in this post which is the important thing :3) ur improving like rly fast mrrow idk i forgor what i wanted to sya,
now more toki pona feed back >:3
i understand what this means i think (they all give me a lot of knowledge. i have a new community there) but theres a few mistakes :3
when saying "give A to B", A should be the direct object, and for B you use a preposition. its the same as in english actually :3 . so in this phrase that would be "one ale li pana e sona mute tawa mi"
in "ni tomo", i think the word order is wrong so it should be "tomo ni". ni with an adjective is very rare and tomo ni makes more sense :3 . also the word tomo isnt the best there imo, because tomo means something physically similar to a building [1]. id say a discord server is a kulupu, or you could call it ma pona because ,, thats the name
this phrase is rly interesting actually !
usually tan is used as a preposition which doesnt make sense grammatically here
but theres also a noun/adjective use that i didnt rly know about and it does make sense i think ! "nimi tan pi toki pona" - "toki pona words, originating [from somewhere else]"
so i think this works and is a really cool way to say this actually :3 but do keep in mind that this isnt a common use of tan and may be misunderstood
[2]
awen means "to keep, to protect" which is . kinda the opposite of what im doing mdfsnnfs [3]
for correcting mistakes i like to use pona, like "improve, fix mistakes". so "sina pona e pakala mute mi" - "you correct my many mistakes"
if you meant "keep correcting my mistakes" (which makes more sense here i think), use "o" to make an imperative. for example: "o awen pona e pakala mi". awen here is a preposition meaning "keep, continue"
I like to chat in the "practice toki pona" channel because it's nearly all toki pona, but just enough English to help me contextualize things. The one trouble is that in an environment where everyone is new and semi-self-taught, it can be hard to know if advice or corrections is helping you be understood by the broader community or no. On the other hand, any practice is good practice!
a - pona tawa sina! tenpo suno ale la, mi pali lili e kama sona pi toki pona.
This has been a difficult distinction for me! I see channels in a server referred to as "tomo" - my sense of it has come to be "a structure" with no regard for the physicality of it, but it's always difficult to know if that sense is shared among speakers
I was admittedly playing a bit with this one, although it's difficult! I think maybe the more standard way of saying this would be something more to the effect of "mama nimi" rather than "nimi tan" but I'm learning maybe just using a second sentence here to complete the description would go a long way for clarifying, as is often the case with toki pona
Regarding "awen" - I have a page open that lists common uses of toki pona words and "awen" has a listing for "endure" there 
There is an issue of finding a single commonly-accepted source of truth for what individual words mean, I'm finding. I just got my ka and pa in the mail a few days ago and have been chewing on them (metaphorically) so hopefully soon I'll get to where I can have some justification for my word choice apart from "google said I could say this" 
tenpo mute la sina toki e toki pona?
mi wile e toki mute...
toki mute li wile e pali mute.
jan ante le wile e toki pi toki Inli
ok im ,, not sure about this now actually
nimi.li says "A tomo contains objects meant to contain things being framed as living". i interpreted this as literally physically containing something (also because all the definitions are words like room, building, etc. so . physical yeah) but it makes a lot of sense for it to have a non-physical meaning
ok update after asking in the kama sona discord and thinking about it more: tomo is just something that "has" or "contains" living things in some way, not necessarily physical. for example, a multiplayer room has people in it, so its a tomo. same for a discord server
i still prefer kulupu for a discord server because to me, the more important thing is the community of people there, rather than . the place. but yeah tomo can be fine too u were right mrraow,,
i think that meant endure as in "to continue to exist for a long time", not "to suffer". in general, awen is about something continuing, not changing. nimi.li says: "awen resists change. awen is the essence of inertia boiled down into one word. if an object is doing something and continues doing that thing, that continuation is awen."
theres no single commonly-accepted truth, because people use words slightly differently, and word meanings change over time :3. i use nimi.li [1] which has detailed explanations of most words, including how they changed over time and different common ways to use them, so its probably the best source of word meanings :3
how long have you been speaking toki pona?
i want to talk a lot...
talking a lot is a lot of effort
other people want to speak english
if i understood everything correctly, this is mostly rly good :3 theres a few small grammatical things
the first sentence isnt a question grammatically, you need one of "seme", ".. anu seme?" or "X ala X". for this sentence, id say "tenpo pi mute seme la sina toki e toki pona?" ("you speak toki pona for time of what much-ness?")
wile can be both a verb and a preverb. if its a preverb, you dont use e. for example, "mi wile toki" - "i want to speak". not 100% sure about this but i think if you "want a verb", you use wile as a preverb, and if you "want a noun", you use wile as a verb
for "mi wile e toki mute", this works too but its more like "i want a lot of speech", and "mi wile toki mute" is "i want to speak a lot" so preverb is better i think
mi sona e toki pona lon tenpo suli tu. taso, mi toki lili. mi lukin li kute li toki ala. mi wile toki. taso, toki li pali. (sina toki e ijo sama a a a. sina lon a)
sina wile la mi en sina o toki kepeken toki pona :3
i know toki pona for about 2 years. but i dont actually speak much. i mostly read and watch and listen to stuf,
i wana talk more but talking is hard,, (thats like . exactly what u said i think,, ur so true msdnfdnf)
if u wanna we can use toki pona more :3
as u . may have noticed smdfnsdfnm ↩︎