Posted: August 06, 2019
Edited: August 06, 2019
Status:
Completed
I spent the entirety of July studying vocabularies so I could better prepare myself for GRE. I had a blast establishing links between words, for example, the word “hippo”, whose official name is hippopotamus, meaning hippo of potamos , which means horse of river, is related to the word “Mesopotamia” which means “meso” two “potamia”, which means between to rivers. It is also related to the name “Hippocrates” who invented the Hippocratic Oath, which means “horse power”. The name “Hippocrates” in turn is linked to the name “Philip”, which means “phil-hippos”, or horse lover. The Latin word for horse is “equus”, which is the predecessor of “equestrian”, which is meant to be the opposite of “pedestrian” as “foot-soldier”. The sound difference is because the Ancient Greeks tends to add a “h” sound somewhere in the PIE word, which is inferred as “ekʷo-“.
Talking about names, the name “Arthur” is suspected to imply “having bear power”, as in the word “Artic”, which is the land you will find if you follow the constellation called Ursa Major, which means “big bear”. Another interesting fact is that bear is actually cognate with the color “brown”. So the “bear” really means “the brown one”. That taboo of called its name is widely observed in the north, see The Brown One, The Honey Eater, The Shaggy Coat, The Destroyer.
Anyway, I have made many connections between these words mainly from an crash course on preparing GRE, but then I found out about the American Heritage Dictionary which gives an amazingly detailed explanation of the PIE etymology. I abandoned myself with such interesting trivia and a month passed.
The comment on this website does not work anymore because the developer for this component decided to terminate the service. So I would have to implement one on my own or turn to Disqus again. I don’t expect it to be fixed any time soon. If you have a comment or suggestion, you can open an issue in this repo or by clicking improve this page down below. Or you can email me at $water$ @ $mail.nankai.edu.cn$
Also I am starting to consider changing the color scheme of this website, this flavor of green can be a little irritating and I hope I can fix that as well.
I would like to make a commitment that I am starting to work on posting again. I will try not to leave it blank for ant longer because it is already hard for me to pick it up now.