If you've been checking my infographics, you know what's coming. Darth is an honorific synonymous with the Sith in Star Wars, and even the people who never watched the saga knows about the whole Darth Vader-being-Luke's-father drama, if only through cultural diffusion. But did they know that Vader means "father" in Dutch? According to George Lucas, the director of the original trilogy, in a Rolling Stone interview, "Darth is a variation of dark. And Vader is a variation of father. So it's basically Dark Father." That confirms everything; now to trace Dutch darth. It is clearly Germanic, from Old Dutch fader, which joins with the root of our word father at the Proto-Germanic juncture, also spelled father, and is ultimately from Proto-Indo-European phter, which is one of the more ubiquitous PIE terms present in basically all the languages. "Father", though. Coooool.
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AUTHORHello! I'm Adam Aleksic. This year, I graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Government and Linguistics. There, I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote a thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy, magna cum laude. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy philosophy, trivia, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law.
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