Yay for lymph! It helps get rid of toxins and stuff! It also has a very cool etymology. Through French lymphe, lymph derives from the Latin word lympha, meaning "water", because lymph looks like water. This, curiously, used to be a word for "water nymph", a mythological guardian of water bodies. This comes from the Greek word nymph, so we saw a little consonant switch since the beginning. After this, the etymology is officially unknown. There have been many attempts to reconstruct an origin, the most probable of which is that it comes from Latin nubere, meaning "to marry", but that's really unsure because it breaks a plethora of linguistic rules. Some linguists have hypothesized a pre-Mediterranean origin or otherwise non-Indo-European root. Either way, it's pretty interesting how the word has changed this far, even.
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AUTHORHello! I'm Adam Aleksic, a senior studying government and linguistics at Harvard University, where I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy trivia, politics, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law.
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