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IDIOTIC IDIOMS

6/21/2017

1 Comment

 
We get the word idiot directly from French idiote, from Latin idiota. The former word meant "dumb person", but the latter meant more along the lines of "uneducated person", which makes all the difference as we go further back to Greek idiotes, or "commoner" (a case where, as we've seen before, the highborns who could read created derogatory words for the lower classes). Since the Greeks had democracy and considered the commoners private citizens, the connection existed for the term to trace to the earlier idios, meaning "private", probably from Proto-Indo-European swe, defined as "self". Now, the word idios also gave way to another Greek word, idioumani, which had the complicated meaning of "something that is privately peculiar". As this became Greek idioma, it meant something more like "peculiar", but still described things that are unique to small groups. This definition stayed through Latin idioma, French idiome, and finally English idiom. So it may be idiotic, but two words in this idiom are peas in a pod.
1 Comment
Paulo
8/18/2022 04:31:47 pm

ista comes from Greek Istes, from Proto-Hellenic *-íďďō, from Proto-Indo-European *-idyéti (verbal suffix), from *-id- + *-yéti.

Yeti is the name of a Nepali monster which means Man of the Stone.

Yeti in protoindo erupeu also means stone man or is it just coincidence?

Where does yeti mean in proto-Indo-European?
I've looked all over the internet and haven't found anything.

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    Hello! I'm Adam Aleksic. I have a linguistics degree from Harvard University, where I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote my thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy traveling, trivia, philosophy, board games, conlanging, and art history. 

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