Level 9 Welsh

Level 9 Welsh!

"One Hundred Percent"

A few months ago, I started re-watching Star Wars: The Clone Wars, but in order to prevent my feeling like I was just wasting my time re-watching a television show, I decided to watch the whole series with French audio (and English subtitles) with the hope of improving my French (un nouvel espoir, if you will).  Recently, I watched an episode in which a character said "One hundred percent."  In French, this is "cent pour cent," which got me thinking.

As a phrase, "cent pour cent" epitomizes the perfect completeness of 100% because cent (from the Latin centum) appears twice.  It's literally "one hundred for one hundred."  In English, however, cent is paired with hundred, which is from Old English.  It's still 100 for 100, but there's this melange of etymologies.

New Dutch Skills

Duolingo "updated [my] skill tree to teach [me] Dutch more effectively" to-day:

I'd completed the skill tree in November last year and was making pretty good progress in getting the skill tree all gold (I think I was about two thirds of the way there), but since Duolingo added all of these new skills, I was left with only seven gold skills.  Seven out of more than one hundred.

In my screen clipping, Duolingo says I've completed two of five lessons in Basics 2, but when I did the third lesson, the other two filled themselves in and the whole skill became gold.  This same sort of thing happened with German when Duolingo added new German skills a few months ago.  It seems that Duolingo added prerequisite skills to skills I've already completed, but I have to do those earlier skills to regain my status in the later ones.  So apparently I don't have nearly as much work to do as it seems, but it's still a bit discouraging because I was getting close to a completely gold skill tree.

Level 15 Norwegian

Level 15 Norwegian!

Level 23 Italian

Level 23 Italian!

"And... And..."

While refreshing Russian Duolingo lessons way back in March, I got a sentence with the correlative "both... and...."

I'd been waiting to get an-other sentence with "both... and..." so I could also take a screen clipping of the little box that explains that "и... и..." is literally "and... and..." but that the first "and" is understood as "both."  I finally got an-other Russian Duolingo sentence with this correlative to-day (while doing a new lesson: the second in the "Around you" skill):

I wanted to write about this just to note that this same correlative (with this same form!) is also in Latin.  Like "и... и...," "et... et..." is literally "and... and...," but the first "and" is understood as "both."

Level 7 Swedish

Level 7 Swedish!

Level 18 Dutch

Level 18 Dutch!

Adieu/Adios/Goodbye

A couple months ago, the local Radio Shack (which didn't want to hire me when I applied there last year) closed.  While driving by it recently, I noticed that the "RadioShack" sign had been blacked out in such a way that the remaining letters spell "adioS."

It made me realize that the Spanish adiós is a cognate with the French adieu.  About a year ago, I read a footnote in a literature anthology that explained that adieu means "to God."  Apparently, the full phrase is the Old French "à Dieu vos comant" (I commend you to God).  In the same way, adiós comes from a Dios.  The other Romance languages have similar words; they're all derived from the Latin ad Deum.

When I read that footnote last year, I also remembered one of the few things I learned in my linguistics class in college: goodbye comes from the phrase "God be with ye."  The phrases are sort of going in opposite directions ("I commend you to God" but "God be with you"), but they express roughly the same sentiment.  Goodbye also has the same formulation as adieu and adiós; they're all phrases condensed into a single word.

Hieraŭ, hodiaŭ, kaj morgaŭ

Yester-day, I did an-other Duolingo lesson in Esperanto (lesson 3 in Verbs: Past & Future).  I learned the words for yester-day (hieraŭ), to-day (hodiaŭ), and to-morrow (morgaŭ).  I think the words themselves will be pretty easy to learn because they're cognates with yester-day, to-day, and to-morrow in languages I already know, but the etymologies bother me.

I lookt up all of these words on wiktionary to confirm the etymologies I suspected.  Hieraŭ and hodiaŭ come from Latin.  Hieraŭ comes from heri (indirectly via the French hier), and hodiaŭ comes from hodie.  But morgaŭ comes from the German Morgen.

Because these three words are so closely related, it would have made sense for all of the Esperanto words to come from the same language.  That they don't seems incongruous.

Level 12 Hebrew

Level 12 Hebrew!

Level 7 Portuguese

Level 7 Portuguese!