Word connections - malaise and sit
From: | Daniel44 <daniel44@...> |
Date: | Thursday, May 24, 2001, 10:44 |
Hi all,
I've been thinking a lot of late about word origins and the interesting
connections between words.
I want to share two examples I've thought of:
'Malaise' - obviously a French word, though I'm not entirely sure of its use
in everyday modern French. In English, we use it to mean 'sickness' or 'bad
feeling'.
'Mal' obviously means 'bad' but what about the ending '-aise'?
My guess is that it comes from the verb s'asseyer (I hope the spelling is
ok) which means 'to sit'.
So 'malaise' could be translated as 'bad sitting'. In English we have such
an expression: 'this just doesn't sit well for me'.
And this brings us onto the English word 'sit'. Is it just a coincidence
that the colloquial word 'to shit' is almost identical? After all, you have
to sit down in order to ... you get the idea.
What do you all think, and what about some other interesting examples in
different languages (conlang and natlang)?
Daniel
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