Exercise U06a2 History of Etymologies

3. History of Etymologies

a. Bachelor-The word bachelor means an unmarried man. However, the word comes from the French word bacheler, which means a young man. The origin comes from the Latin language. In Latin, baccalaris, means a man who owns land. When we look even closer we see the word bacca, which means cow in Latin. The man could have owned a cow farm.

b. Bagel- Comes from the Yeddish word, beygel. Its origin comes German, boug, which means ring or bracelet.

c. Bikini- was named after a location where the U.S government completed a nuclear weapons test. The location was Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The inventor of the bikini wanted to use the news of this nuclear test to make a profit for his business.

d. Canada- comes from the Iroquois, kanata, which means town or village. The word was first published in the a journal dating back to the sixteenth century.

e. Colonel- comes from the Italian language, colonello or colonna, meaning commander of a military column. The French then adopted the rank, but switched the L sound to an R and they pronounced the word coronel. The English started using the word in the sixteenth century, but spelled it coronell.  By the seventeenth century the word colonel, was pronounced with an R instead of the L, and was an accepted spelling for the word.     

f. Doughnut- was first used by Washington Irving in his book  Knickerbocker’s History of New York. The dough is easy to explain, but why the nut. The nut refers to the size of the dough that was used to make the doughnuts during the nineteenth century.

g. Flea Market-  In French the word fleas means, low or cheap. The places that people had rented were called fleas because it meant that they were cheap and usually infested by fleas. The term flea market comes from the French phrase marché aux puces, which means market with fleas.  This translates to an open market where cheap goods can be bought.

h. Handicap- Is short for hand in the cap. Bettors would show up to put their wages in at a horse race. An umpire would determine the odds for a race. With their hands in the cap, the bettors would pull their hands from the cap and they would have to show whether they accepted or forfeited the bet.

i. Honeymoon- first apprears in the sixteenth century. It originally meant the first month of a marriage. Honey represents the sweetness of new love and moon represents the changes that will take place in the relationship over time.

j. Husband- comes from Old English. Hus, means house and the root word for the band is búa or bóa, which means to dwell. Therefore husband means one who lives in a house.  

Wilton, David. (2011) General format. Retrieved from http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php

4.

Phonetic Demand	Semantic Demand	Etymological Demand
Bat	trait-traitor	yield (old English)
Sip	sail- sailor	daily (old English)
Run	buy- buyer	hue (old English)
Lid	crawl-crawler	orchard (old English)
Zip	quiet-quieter	nostril (old English)

7.  Long /o/ sound

oCe	Ow	Oa	o
Note	Flown	Float	Open
Wrote	Grown	Boat	Don’t
Promote	Blown	Coat	Ogre
Remote	Stow	Gloat	Only
Pope	Flow	Throat	Robot
Rope	Mow	Loathe	Ocean
Strobe	Know	Soap	Oval

There are some generalizations that I can make when looking at the letter /o/ and the different variations of the letters to make the phoneme /o/.  The one generalization that I looked at involved the /ow/. When we make the /o/ sound, we do actually make the sound of the /w/ at the end of the phoneme.  Even though we do not hear the /w/ there is some representation of the sound. The next generalization I looked at was the letters /oa/. The phoneme of /o/ will be the only sound that is heard when placed next to the /a/.