BEARER OF SIGNS

In my first language of Serbian and in Russian, we use the word семафор for "traffic light". When spoken aloud, this sounds like sehmah-for. Yesterday in traffic I had an epiphany concerning this: in English, we also have the word semaphore (pronounced the exact same way) as a noun for the communication system using colored flags to send messages. You can see the connection: both use colors to signal something to you. It seems like the words from both languages come from French semafore, which literally meant "bearer of symbols". This has two parts: Ancient Greek sema, meaning "sign", and phoros, meaning "bearer". Sema, a root in semantic and polysemy, comes from the Proto-Indo-European root dyeh, meaning "to notice". Phoros, which is present in phosphorous and Christopher, comes from Proto-Indo-European bher, "carry". Surprisingly, usage of the word semaphore in literature over time increased all the way up to the 1990s, but has been on the downturn since.