The Spanish for “chest”, pecho, sounds completely different than
the English chest. But it is related to the English word for the chest
bones: the Pectoral Girdle. The relationship is the Lat...
The Spanish for “night”, noche, is related (via the common Latin
ancestor) nocturnal. Here’s the interesting part: the Latin sound
“ct” consistently changed to the “ch” sound in Spa...
The Spanish Decir (“to say”) comes from the Latin dictio for
“word”. Its participle form is dicho — and dicho also means
“saying”, in the sense of, a cliche. Thus decir is another e...
The law and the good, in European languages, are associated with
straight lines; the bad with the crooked. Think about the word crooked
itself, literally! Or about right/rectangle, or the Greek o...
Luchar, Spanish for “to fight”, doesn’t sound like its cousin
reluctant – although of course everyone is reluctant to fight. But
the relationship is closer than it seems. Reluctant comes ...
Suspect and the Spanish equivalent, sospechoso, are easy to identify
and obviously the same word, both from the same Latin root, suspectus.
That’s not the interesting part. Rather, as Latin evo...
An easy way to remember the Spanish decir (to say) is through the word
predict. Predict is, literally, pre – decir — to say beforehand.
Pre means “before” and the dict- maps almost exactl...
The Latin for “eight” is Octo, from which we get the English
Octagon. Since most Latin words with a -ct- sound, like Octo, had the
-ct- turn into a -ch- as the language evolved into Spanish, ...
Ah, one of our all-time favorite patterns and examples: leche, the
common Spanish word meaning, “milk.” Leche is a first cousin of
the English lactose via a very interesting pattern: the -ct-...
The Spanish mancha (“spot” or “stain”) comes from the Latin
word for the same, macula. From the Latin macula, we get the
English… immaculate — which literally means (knowing the negat...
