Amuse-bouche: To ignore someone is to give yourself ignorance. If you ignore someone, you are choosing ignorance.

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Today’s Wonderful Word: “Wanderwort.”

Definition: a loanword borrowed from one language and established in many unrelated languages, usually in a chain of adoption determined by established trade routes, and sometimes undergoing changes caused by contact with the native language of the dominant group where the word is adopted.

Examples: “Tea” and “chai” are Wanderworts that spread around the world as their namesake was traded, with “tea” more common along maritime routes, and “chai” the more common variant over land.

The Wanderwort “cat” has forms like “qiṭṭ” in Arabic that look familiar even though Arabic and English are not related.

Etymology: Wanderwort is a borrowing from German and literally translates as “wander word.” German wander shares an origin with the English verbs wander, wend, and wind. Meanwhile, German Wort is related to English word. Wanderwort was first recorded in English in the early 1910s.

Other examples:

Sugar, ginger, copper, silver, mint, wine, and honey are Wanderworts that can be traced back to the Bronze Age trade.

Another example is orange, which originated in a Dravidian language (likely Tamil, Telugu or Malayalam), and whose likely path to English included, in order, Sanskrit, Persian, possibly Armenian, Arabic, Late Latin, Italian, and Old French. 

The word for “horse” across many Eurasian languages seem to be related to Mongolian, Manchu, Korean, Japanese, Thai, and Sino-Tibetan languages leading to Mandarin and Tibetan. It is present in several Indo-European languages as well but limited only to the Celtic and Germanic branches leading to the Irish marc or English mare.

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Answer to Saturday’s riddle:

I’m sorry. There is no solution to the brain teaser. It was an impossible task. This won’t happen again. It was a special occasion (April Fool’s Day).

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