Etymology things

[xiphias]

This morning, as I was driving Lis to work, we were wondering why so few English words have "lk" sounds in them, yet the phoneme is easy for English speakers to say. The only common words that end in "-ilk" are "milk" and "silk", with "ilk" being not-really-common and "filk" being technically jargon, and then you're into things like "wilk", which is an obsolete form of "whelk" that we only found because Lis started using her phone to look up words that end in -ilk. Yet we have no trouble saying "-ilk". So we started looking up -ulk, such as "bulk", and "hulk", and one thing led to another.

Did you know that the Yiddish word "yenta", meaning a gossip and busybody is from the name of a character in a 1923 comic strip that ran in the Forward?

Anyway, does anyone know of a dictionary of proto-Indo-European words that have been deduced?

Comments

[ron_newman]

We distinguish between "Mary", "marry", and "merry"

We do?

[bluerosesgirl.livejournal.com]

*I* do, for sure.

and this:
"We speak written English, rather than writing spoken English."

makes all the sense in the world -- or maybe makes all my world make sense. Ayuh. (And is also why I'll never write like Flannery O'Connor.)

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Bluerosesgirl and me.

[cos]

Certainly the last one is different from the first two, for me.

I wonder if Erin vs. Aaron is like this too. Were those pronounced identically at some point and we made them different due to spelling? Current status is similar to marry vs. merry - people from other places generally seem to pronounce Erin and Aaron identically whereas I'm used to them being different. But just because they got to the same place as the marry/merry pair doesn't necessarily mean they followed the same path...