At least in japanese, the other days of the week are also associated with celestial bodies, tuesday 'fire day', wednesday 'water day', thursday 'wood day', friday 'gold day', and saturday 'dirt day'.
mars: fire planet
mercury: water planet
jupiter: wood planet
venus: gold planet
saturn: dirt planet
If you're familiar with any romance language, the days of the week associate correctly with the names of the planets (martis, mercurii, jovis); and in english the rough translations into anglo-saxon/norse gods applies (tyr/tiw, thor, freija)
Apparently it's unlikely to be an accident, but it's a very ancient connection, via the chinese, who have in more recent times ditched the system.
> The Chinese had apparently adopted the seven-day week from the Hellenistic system by the 4th century, although by which route is not entirely clear. It was again transmitted to China in the 8th century by Manichaeans, via the country of Kang (a Central Asian polity near Samarkand).[20] The 4th-century date, according to the Cihai encyclopedia,[year needed] is due to a reference to Fan Ning (范寧), an astrologer of the Jin Dynasty. The renewed adoption from Manichaeans in the 8th century (Tang Dynasty) is documented with the writings of the Chinese Buddhist monk Yijing and the Ceylonese Buddhist monk Bu Kong.
> The Chinese transliteration of the planetary system was soon brought to Japan by the Japanese monk Kobo Daishi; surviving diaries of the Japanese statesman Fujiwara no Michinaga show the seven-day system in use in Heian Period Japan as early as 1007. In Japan, the seven-day system was kept in use (for astrological purposes) until its promotion to a full-fledged (Western-style) calendrical basis during the Meiji era. In China, with the founding of the Republic of China in 1911, Monday through Saturday in China are now named after the luminaries implicitly with the numbers.
The naming scheme also holds for French, except for Saturday (samedi [0]) and Sunday(dimanche [1]), which originates from "Day of Shabbat" and "Day of the Lord". But according to wikipedia [0], samedi replaced the "Day of Saturn".
What? They use the same seven-day week today.
They name the days "one", "two", "three", etc, which was actually an innovation by Christian missionaries in China, not the Chinese themselves. The seventh day is named "day" rather than being numbered, so that the full name is 礼拜天 "the day of worship", anchoring the week firmly to the Christian week.
(The same effort to rename the days of the week along more Christian lines was also made in Europe, but it didn't take there.)
> the rough translations into anglo-saxon/norse gods applies (tyr/tiw, thor, freija)
I was kind of amused to see "anglo-saxon/norse" followed by "tyr/tiw"; Tyr is the Norse form and Tiw is the English form.
(The goddess honored by Friday was Frig in English, and Thor is of course Thunor -- his name is nothing but the ordinary word "thunder".)
But I don't think even most Japanese people are aware of this today; the only common use of 曜 is its use in the name of every weekday, so people think of 火曜日 as being segmented 火-曜日, the weekday ("曜日", etymologically spurious) of fire (火).
I don't know the modern Japanese word for Mars, but in Chinese it's 火星, not 火曜.
Maybe for the second one you meant "names of the planets"?
China is a relative latecomer here and typically lags these types of ancient civilizational innovations, with the oldest being Mesopotamia and Egypt. In China, the seven day week was adopted in the late 4th Century A.D. in the Jin dynasty roughly 3000 years after it was adopted in Mesopotamia.
There are two theories as to the origin of the seven day week, one that it started in ancient Babylon and another that it started in ancient Egypt.
The concept of a "week" is directly tied to the concept of a sabbath (a special holy day to mark the end of the week). This, in turn is related to Babylonian numerical systems -- they had a base 6 system corresponding to 6 days of work followed by the religious day, and hence the origin of our seven day week. Interestingly, unlike in judaism where the seventh day is considered one in which work was forbidden as God rested on that week, in Babylonian tradition, the seventh day was considered unlucky for work and thus work was to be avoided. It is a fine line separating these different notions of a Sabbath and thus of the week.
Another speculated origin for the week was via lunar observations -- e.g. a quarter phase of the moon corresponding to a half-moon either waxing or waning with a lunar month being roughly 29.5 days, so 1/4 of that would be 7.4 days. But there are different ways to divide this -- e.g. a sequence of 7 day units followed by a sequence of special days tacked at the end or some other combination. You actually see these types of divisions in some ancient Babylonian calendars. But with a base 6 system, there are some nice divisions, e.g. 6 days of work followed by the holy day = 1 week
4 weeks followed by a holy day at the end = 1 month
the residual .5 day, can accumulate so that after 12 months, 12*.5 = 6. 6 special days to be added at the end of 12 months.
In the ancient past, you had different regions practicing their own calendar system and one of the first innovations of the first (known) empire in Mesopotamia was the standardization of weeks and months as different cities were brought into the Sumerian empire. Sargon I of Akkad is said to have standardized the week by ensuring that the different cities he conquered were synced up and observed the same set of extra holy days in what is the first (known) empire
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1179/0308018827898012...
However there is some linguistic evidence that the Sumerians merely borrowed the concept of a week from the Akkadian civilization, so the earlier Akkadian civilization is believed to have held the concept of a week first.
Once you have the notion of a week, it is not hard to name it after the sun, moon, and 5 celestial planets, as these were the primary astronomical phenomena. You can see these names in ancient languages here: https://www.hermetic.ch/cal_stud/hlwc/why_seven.htm
I think this needs a citation. I've never seen any mention of 7-day weeks in historical Chinese texts. Systems of 7-day weeks might be known by Chinese by this time due to cultural and religious exchanges with the West, but claims that it was "adopted" is news to me. My impression is that the current 7 day week system adopted in China is a very recent phenomenon, i.e. presumably not earlier than the 19th century, and mostly due to the work of Christian missionaries. (... I could be wrong though, I haven't read that much post-Jin texts...)
Some I can think of offhand are the ones with the consonant + l -> ll change:
Plano + llano
Clave + llave
Pleno + lleno
I think there are some others where Latin vowels like /o/ or /e/ change to diphthongs like /we/ or /je/ and they get re-imported with /o/ or /e/ again. I can't think of examples of this right now but I am sure they exist. [Edit: foco + fuego is one such example]
Probably others with word initial /f/ put to silent h, then re-imported with an f again.
Wiktionary has a long list of these here:
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Spani...
As dt_r pointed, apotheke always meant "away room" so it makes sense to think that it got the new meaning because of context: it surely was imported alongside other Greek terms about drugs.
Actually, "apo" has the meaning of "away" here, so "away-box" would be more accurate. Maybe you are confusing it with "ypo", which actually means "under" in Greek?
I always enjoy reading about this stuff, btw!
Anything with the "teca" (or "theque" in other languages) has some relation, like modern discoteca or biblioteca = library.
> "Cancer" later took on an alternative meaning, "enclosure", because of the way a crab's pincers form a circle.
I am not an expert, but I think this may be backwards. I think the original meaning was circle, from which both the "enclose" meaning and the "crab" meaning (because the pincers form a circle or an enclosure) derive.
wiktionary [1] has the most in-depth etymology I can find, and has for "cancer" (meaning crab) the etymology is: karkros (“enclosure”) (because the pincers of a crab form a circle), from Proto-Indo-European kr-kr- (“circular”), reduplication of Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- (“to turn, bend”) in the sense of "enclosure", and as such a doublet of carcer. Cognate with curvus.
Anyway, that aside, I felt stupid not having realized the etymology of "cancel," since in Italian (one of my languages) "cancello" means "gate."
My favorite etymological thing is the German „Bank“ which can mean bench or bank. Funnily enough the financial institution is a loan via the Italian „banca“ but that itself goes back to the same old Germanic root as the bench you sit on.
Related: Be mindful when your Denglish tempts you to say, "Danke für das Gift!"
> Benches were used as makeshift desks or exchange counters during the Renaissance by Florentine bankers
Looking at a translation of the lords prayer, wondering where the word 'hallowed' came in, since it wouldn't have been part of the original language, I delved into why hallow was the substitute for sacred, and what the origins of 'sacred' were.
Sacere, a set-aside area, so so something set aside is 'sacred'. To hallow something is to hold it in high regard, to respect it, to put it in another category other than the normal one.
The hebrews had seven holy names and EL was one of them. Imagine if you time traveled back to that time and asked random people in the fertile crescent, who or what do you worship? They technically couldn't answer that because their beliefs told them not to say that word, but they COULD say the ____
the ____
el (blank)
the the
EL EL? I worship the ____ (cant say it, leave a blank)
A blank? Like a hollow? A word with a separate category? A set-aside-area? Sacere. Sacred. So, our father hallowed be thy name is like saying you have a separate category for that name. What is the normal category for all the normal words? You can say them and you can write them. What is special about the 'sacred' words? You don't say them.
The tradition of not pronouncing the name YHWH is specific to rabbinic judaism and was not a feature of either temple judaism as practiced in the era of King David nor religions in the fertile crescent.
Rather the opposite, as names of Gods were loudly and proudly proclaimed. We know this because of poems (which were sung outloud) composed that contain names of gods in such a way as proper pronounciaton is required for the songs to have the right rhythm and meter. (This is also how modern scholars believe the correct pronounciation is "Yahweh", e.g. that the vav was a "w" sound and the yod was a "y" sound.) In fact the very idea of a name that could be written but not spoken presupposes a tradition of reading and writing texts -- something practiced by Masoretes and Pharisees -- rather than a service consisting of songs and spoken ceremonies as performed in actual temples.
It is a question as to which extra-levitical sects initially began this tradition of omitting the name in spoken pronunciation sometime during the second temple period, as it was most likely related to them not being priests and thus not considering themselves worthy to say the name, but when the priestly service ended and the temple was destroyed, guardianship of law passed to rabbinical groups focused on working with texts, and then no one was considered worthy to say the name and thus it became a general prohibition even though the royal singers singing the psalms loudly sang "Yahweh" in almost every song in daily service.
But this practice of omitting the name was not shared by other semitic groups in the region, nor is it present in Arabic cultures. So let's not backpropagate that relatively modern scholarly tradition to religious practices in the fertile crescent during the dawn of civilization.
While modern translations are extremely good, publishers are apparently hesitant to modify verses prone to memorization or used in liturgies (such as the Lord's prayer),
Hallowed is word of Germanic origin. It has shared etymology with holy and is part of the name of the Anglo-Saxon pagan festival Halloween.
> The leap from a word meaning "imaginary" to a word meaning "fantastic" struck me as odd initially, but apparently it comes from the sense of the word "imaginary" as "unreal".
What other sense is there that Wiktionary doesn’t know about?
My primary association with the word "fantastic" is simply "great" or "very good", as in "you did a fantastic job!". It's this meaning of the word that I found oddly disconnected from the word "imaginary". How do you get from something meaning "not real" to something meaning "very good"?
But the word "unreal" helped me make the leap, since that's a word I would use to describe something I thought was "very cool" or "well done".
"Fantastic" also means "based on fantasy", so the leap to "imaginary" is short.
Like "fantastic voyage", "fantastic beliefs", "fantastic visions".
The link between "fantastic" and "phenotype" was surprising to me, even though it makes sense reading it.
f=v=b=p, g=k, d=t, y=o=u, e=i.
Cybernetics -> kupirnitics
Government -> kupirnit
It's probably also related to "operatus" (Latin for "work", things like cooperate and opera come from it) but I can't find sources. (co)operatus -> (k)upiratus
Another example is the famous "father" etymology:
Father/vader/pater -> patir (PIE *pH₂tér)
This happens a lot for third declension nouns where nominative ends in -s (opus is one such example)
Other examples of this pattern:
Corpus -> corporem (not *corpusem)
Venus -> Venerem (not *Venusem)
Flos -> florem (not *flosem)
Colos -> colorem (not *colosem)
Or more simply, we can look at opus and see it comes from a different PIE root from cyber. (When i look it up, the former has a root meaning "work", and the latter has a root meaning "turn")
We have a tendency to think of "cy" as an S followed by an "ai" diphthong. But if we consider the "c" as a hard /k/ and the "y" as a vowel similar to /u/, there isn't a huge difference between "cyber" and "guber", the latter form showing up in Latin and ultimately in English words like "gubernatorial".
France - frank (being unencumbered in speech) - franchise (the right to vote)
An amazing one that I've found striking for a while and that also involves an ethnic group is
ciao - slave - Slav
> Borrowed from Italian ciao (“hello, goodbye”), from Venetian ciao (“hello, goodbye, your (humble) servant”), from Venetian s-ciao / s-ciavo (“servant, slave”), from Medieval Latin sclavus (“Slav, slave”), related also to Italian schiavo, English Slav, slave and Old Venetian S-ciavón ("Slav"), from Latin Sclavonia (“Slavonia”).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ciao#Etymology
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slave#English "because Slavs were often forced into slavery in the Middle Ages"
The etymology of the Slavs' autonym itself is much more disputed, but possibly derives from the Slavic word for "word", so meaning "people who can talk", among several totally different suggestions. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/s...
Well in pretty much every Slavic language analog of "słowo" is "word" and "słowianin" is Slav. And in most of these languages the word for Germans (the most common non-Slavic foreigners) is analog of "Niemiec" which is the same word root as "mute person" (niemy).
I don't see how it can be disputed.
That is only one possible origin. The other one is "frec" (greedy, bold, brave).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic...
From which we get Wales, Cornwall, Gaul, Walloon, and Wallachia. Originally the name of a particular tribe, but came to refer to angry foreign neighbours more generally.
Well it is explained below. Turns out that Finns had another word "Marsu" for walrus, which also have tusks. So therefore they started using a similar word for a (somewhat) similar animal.
As there are no walruses in Finland, it was nearly as mysterious a creature as an elephant to Finns, who mostly encountered only walrus tusks and walrus hides through trading.[2]
Russian borrowed the word for walrus морж from some Sámi or some Finnic language, as the Russian expansion to the Arctic Ocean is historically much later than the Sámi and Finnic settlement in the area. [2] From Russian, the word got borrowed into French as morse.
Btw, you had a typo in the name of the animal. marsu means "a guinea pig" in Finnish, borrowed from Swedish marsvin (literally "a sea pig"), which in turn comes from German.
[1](https://www.sgr.fi/sust/sust266/sust266_aikio.pdf) [2](https://journal.fi/virittaja/article/view/40611)
The question is, why those two languages and only those two?
What's worse, the Slavic word dates to proto-Slavic times, it's one of the basic animal words like "deer", "rabbit", "cow", etc.!
So the only languages in Europe except the other language in Europe? :)
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=shit
The notion is of "separation" from the body (compare Latin excrementum, from excernere "to separate," Old English scearn "dung, muck," from scieran "to cut, shear;" see sharn). It is thus a cousin to science and conscience.
> Etymology: < Anglo-Norman cience, sience, Anglo-Norman and Middle French science (French science) knowledge, understanding, secular knowledge, knowledge derived from experience, study, or reflection, acquired skill or ability, knowledge as granted by God (12th cent. in Old French), the collective body of knowledge in a particular field or sphere (13th cent.) < classical Latin scientia knowledge, knowledge as opposed to belief, understanding, expert knowledge, particular branch of knowledge, learning, erudition < scient- , sciēns, present participle of scīre to know, of unknown origin + -ia -ia suffix¹.
Not claiming the OED is right and etymonline is wrong, of course (it could equally well be the other way around); just noting that this may not be a universally accepted etymology.
The first and second editions of the OED did not show many (any?) Indo-European roots, at least as far as I can recall, and they may not have been incorporated fully yet into the current online edition either. It’s also possible that the OED editors are cautious about accepting Indo-European etymologies, which are reconstructed rather than based on written evidence.
[1] https://www.ahdictionary.com/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Heritage_Dictiona...
https://www.etymonline.com/word/science https://www.etymonline.com/word/shit
The example I most remember is "suppository" (from Latin) and "hypothesis" (from Greek), both literally meaning 'put under'. (The actual etymological calque would be "supposition".)
As https://devjoe.appspot.com/huntindex/ isn't updated with 2021 puzzles yet, I don't know how to find the specific puzzle I'm thinking of to show the other examples. :-)
But that aside, if you're interested in calques, checkout Old Church Slavonic, they calqued massive amounts of Greek words, rather than going the lazy route of English and just borrowing them. They hade the same issue, no way to express these complex religious ideas, but solved it in different way. A lot of these words are still used in modern slavic languages.
преображение = transfiguration (pre-obrazhenie, pere = through, obraz = image)
Богородица = Θεοτόκος (bogoroditsa, bog = god, rodit' = give birth)
I especially love that S:t John Chrysostomos is called Ioann Zlatoust (Golden mouth) and Constantinople is Tsargrad or Konstantinograd.
Theophilus (Gottlieb) is Amadeus in Latin.
> but solved it in different way
Different from what? You were mentioning that Latin calques of Greek are common, which is my impression too (ἀνά-στασις → re-surrectio, ὑπό-στασις -> sub-stantia, and non-religious συμ-πάθεια → com-passio).
masculus and femella are diminutives of mas and femina respectively.
Weirdly, English got "man" from Old German (meaning a person), but "human" from the Latin "homo", so just like female, the "hu-" in human isn't a prefix either, but derived from a totally different word.
Then again, "man" extends back to proto-Indo- European, so maybe it's all related regardless.
I’ve never understood why we kept V but got rid of J. It would make more sense to distinguish either both or neither.
It’s really a pet peeve of mine when I hear people pronounce Latin words starting with v and using the modern English v. It’s pronounced as w.
anello (ring, think annular)
anno (year, think annual)
ano (anus)
all come from the Latin word for ring: the year because of the repetition of seasons and the anus, well, because of its shape.
I've always loved the same thing—finding hidden connections between everyday words. I recently did this with "vain". It comes from Latin vanus, meaning "empty". More obvious with the "in vain" meaning, but the modern day comes from the idea of an exaggerated self image, with no substance behind it. It has a ton of "empty" cognates: vanish, evanescence, vanity (table), vaunt, vacuous, vacuum, vacation, void, devastate, wanton, wane
Fun fact: the Latin word for "in vain" is frustra.
Cross-language ones are also fun. I like that the German word for poison is "Gift", which etymologically means "something given". Makes for some good puns.
This is a very clever approach to determining these automatically. There is a field of Computational Humor and I suspect you could combine this with a GPT-3-type mechanism to make some good jokes.
“Gift” means poison in Swedish as well, and adding to that, it also means “married”. When I was a kid (before I really understood that words are shared) I remember feeling worried about some friends of the family that were about to get married. From the sound of it, I thought something bad was about to happen.
I had simply learned, in quite sensible order, the meaning of poison before married.
However, although Wiktionary gives the etymology of "grime" as "from Proto-Germanic grīmô (“mask”)", it also says: "Possibly influenced by Danish grim (“soot, grime”), Old Dutch grijmsel, Middle Dutch grime, Middle Low German greme (“dirt”)." The former goes back to "Proto-Indo-European gʰrēy- (“to paint, streak, smear”), from gʰer- (“to rub, stroke”)", which is also the origin of "Christ", but the latter goes back to "Proto-Indo-European gʰrem- (“to resound; thunder”)". According to Wiktionary. But that doesn't really make much sense, does it? I think there must be a mistake in there somewhere.
Amusingly, "Grim" is also one of the names of the Norse god Odin, presumably because he wore a mask. (Is that perhaps mentioned in the film "The mask"?) So Christ and Odin have the same name, sort of.
Stick that in your non-Asgardian pipe and smoke it, Neo!
[1] https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=QQovEeLHVl0C&pg=PA115&lp...
Japanese has many -mono words based on verbs: tabemono 食べ物 is food (eat-thing), nomimono 飲み物 is a beverage (drink-thing), tatemono 建物 is a building (build-thing), kudamono 果物 is fruit (reward-thing; the Japanese word for “to fruit” being related to the verb for achieving, similar to English “come to fruition”).
In other words, an idiot is someone so caught up in their own perspective they are incapable of engaging in fruitful public conversation. Don't know what Plato would think of Twitter then . . .
Similarly, "joust" and "juxtapose" are cognates via French and neo-Latinate French respectively (ultimately from iūxtā, a Latin preposition meaning "near", "next to").
However, my most favourite pair of surprising cognates that I discovered recently is "durian" (the fruit) and "iwi" (a word loaned from Maori into New Zealand English meaning "tribe"). This one goes way back into Proto-Austronesian...
iacere = to throw
* inject: to throw in (could be a vaccine injection, or e.g. data injected in a program)
* eject: to throw out
* reject: to throw back
* abject: to thow away => cast aside => despicable ("abject coward") => miserable ("abject poverty")
* conjecture: something thrown together
* interject: to throw inbetween
* subject: throw under => something placed underneath something else ("a British subject", the subject of a sentence, "subject to terms and conditions", the subject of a paper)
* object: thrown against/facing => to expose => something tangible/material
* objective: a material object => not influenced by emotions but based on observed facts
vs subjective: subject to emotions/personal opinions
* objective: thrown against/facing => goal
* trajectory: to throw accross
* project: to throw forth
* adjective: to throw towards => something added/additional => an adjective
* jet: a "throw" => a jet e.g. of water => a spout that jets
=> jet engine => a jet (plane with jet engines)
=> jet set (lifestyle of people that can travel for pleasure)
legere = to choose, to collect/gather, to read
* elect, elective (optional), elite ("chosen out"), 1337 (= leet, from elite), elegant
* select
* collect
* lecture, college, lector, lectern, lesson
* neglect
* intellect, intelligent (originally "discerning", literally "choose between")
* diligent (to choose apart)
* legion (a collection of soldiers in the Roman army, now also meaning "numerous")
* legend: "that which must be read"
"Ma" is virtually always the first sound a baby makes, and is also reminiscent of breastfeeding, with the lips pursing together. It's widely hypothesized that because of this, the word for "mother" in nearly every language on the planet is some variant of "ma(m)".
"Da" and "pa" are the next-easiest sounds to make. Hence, "dada/papa" for father (originally pH₂tér in PIE, where h2 is the "a-colored laryngeal).
Anyway, we have the word "man", related to the Latin "homo", which is suspiciously close to "mama". Nowadays, "man" (and the Italian "uomo") has mostly masculine connotation. But it strikes me as really weird how close it is to such a feminine phoneme. My headcannon is that "mam" is the root of words referring to both "mother" (the first human a baby experiences) and "humanity" as a whole.
It's hard to tease apart the influence of "guma"/dhghem, the PIE for earth. Also related to "Adam" (as in "Adam and Eve") who was famously made from Earth...yes Genesis is essentially based around a giant pun in Hebrew.
Mama/dada/adamah/humana - they all swirl around the same phonetic space, and I don't think this is a coincidence.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/*dhghem-?ref=etymonline_cros...
Some pairs I found interesting from that book:
* Aardvark - Porcelain
* Brassiere - Pretzel (bonus: bracelet and embrace)
* Bid - Buddha
* Hieroglyphics - Clever
* Zodiac - WhiskeyFrom this, I learned that “white” and “black” are cognate with an IE root that meant both burning and burned.
The Phoenician alphabet was heavily based on Ancient Egyptian hieroglyph script. The Greek alphabet was in turn originally based on the Phoenician alphabet. Finally, the Coptic alphabet was based on Greek, bringing it full circle back to Egypt!
Roving peddlers were the norm in the Middle Ages; sellers with a fixed location often were bookshops licensed by universities; hence the word acquired a more specific sense than its etymological one.
Turns out that they both derive from "caput" (head) in its sense of chapter or heading, due to the formal process of surrendering in war, which involved drafting a document explicating the terms of surrender which was divided into chapters.
The Latin cadō root had multiple meanings, like "fall", "die" and "decay". So while "cadaver" is obvious, "casual" took a circuitous route of "fall" -> "accident" -> "by chance", and eventually "informal".
- Defense (protecting something)
- Fencing (protecting yourself with a sword)
- Fence (a wall that protects your property)
- Fence (someone who buys stolen goods which allows the thief to protect themselves from getting caught)
While I am amused by auto-antonyms, and words that mean opposite things while having the same root, I never found them to be surprising, because being the complete opposite of something is actually related to that something, akin to the bitwise "not" operation.
I am glad this definition took that into account.
Yoga literally means union and is derived from a prefix yuj meaning to attach, join, harness, yoke.
Explains how "ciao" comes from "servus" via "schiavo", meaning slave or servant.
It's also related to words in other languages meaning fame, word, and language.
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-blindboy-podcast/i...
[1] Library link: https://www.worldcat.org/title/thirty-two-words-for-field-lo...
Also the Spanish/Portuguese "estar" (to be).