Sometimes, I get curious about words. Where they came from, how they've changed over time, and if they look the same in other related languages. Amateur etymology is fun and easy to do once you know a little bit about sound changes.
I started to get curious about the story behind dog because I noticed that it doesn't appear to come from the same root as all the other Indo-European languages' words for that animal. For example:
German, Swedish: hund
Dutch: hond
French: chien
Italian: cane
Irish: cú
Hindi: kutta
Albanian: qen
Greek: skylos
Russian: собака [sobaka]
Latvian: suns
Armenian: shown
(I tried to cover all the branches of Indo-European here, but I was having a hard time finding Farsi, so this will have to do.)
Now, I know what you're thinking. "Dude, Lina. Most of those words aren't similar at all." So, let's do an itty-bitty reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European. chien and cane both come from the Latin canus. hund and hond (also English hound) come from some Proto-Germanic word I'll call h*nd. In many Latin/Germanic word pairs, c/k corresponds to h. Those sounds are relatively close in the mouth, so it's easy to imagine how it happened. Therefore, canus and h*nd probably come from the same root. It's also easy to imagine that skylos came from the same root as canus and, somewhere along the line, had that s thrown in front of it. By whatever process caused that, we may have ended up with all those other s-initial words. kutta and qen (that q is made between the English ch and k sounds) are also similar to canus.
As you can probably guess, two languages like Italian and Hindi don't have a lot in common today. They have both evolved from the same language, but you probably can't find many obvious cognates. And yet, there's a pair like cane and kutta. This says something really interesting about dogs. Dogs have been so important for so long that the Proto-Indo-European people had a word for it that is still recognizable as what people use today. The same goes for cats. Here's a list of the word for cat in a few modern IE languages: chat, katze, chait, gatos, gato, kot, katt... you get the idea.
So what's with dog? Like I already pointed out, English has hound. That word used to mean any dog, but in the 12th century, it began to shift meaning to only "dog used for hunting."¹ The exact origin of the word that replaced it, plain old dog, is a mystery.
Here are some other examples that don't seem to fit:
Spanish: perro
Polish: pies
Gaelic: madadh
The origin of perro is a mystery, just like dog. I don't know anything about the history of pies, or if it's related to perro. And my only guess about madadh is that it actually means fox, or used to just mean fox. Irish and Gaelic are similar enough that cú might also work in Gaelic. So I guess for the English, Spaniards, and Poles, "[k/h]*n*" just wasn't good enough!
I like that hound still exists in English. A little reminder of our roots; of what our ancestors saw fit to call those things.
The strange thing about cool is that it seems like an idiom, it seems like slang. And yet, there is no other word that cool is slang for. Other words, that come and go, are slang for cool. An idiom can be explained as a word or phrase that won't translate directly into another language, like "the bee's knees." Speakers of other languages probably don't think bees' knees are worthy of remark, let alone... cool.
But how can you translate cool? Stick it into Babelfish and translate to French and you get frais, as in "kind of cold." What English word could you stick in there to find out how the French call something cool?
Incidentally, they use cool. They borrowed the English word, and they're not alone. German also took cool. Mandarin has kù. Russian has coolnah. Swedish has coolt. There are surely many other examples I'm not aware of. Now, these languages have their own non-borrowed words with the same meaning. But nonetheless, cool is clearly a... a... hot word. Oh yeah. (Sorry.)
There are a couple of ways to look at this. One is that cool is still slang, and the nature of slang is that it's idiomatic and good luck translating it. But I think there's a better explanation.
I say cool is just not slang anymore. It's a word with two formal meanings: kinda cold, and rad/awesome/hot/the bee's knees. It's pretty clear that cool is not a typical fad slang word. It's not limited to a particular age group or other demographic, like most slang is. It's not going anywhere anytime soon. Teenagers can tell their clueless parents that "sick means cool now," and their parents will understand. (Do people still say sick? I hope not.) In other words, when you type cool into Babelfish, it should be confused about which meaning you want. (But then again, Babelfish is confused by pretty much anything.) The dictionary will offer you great, fine, excellent, and fashionable. But I don't feel like any of those quite hit the mark by themselves. Cool has become its own animal.
Cool has meant that since 1933. It came from Black English and was apparently spread by saxophonist Lester Young.² Can you even imagine what he would think if he could see how wildly successful his preferred slang word has become?
(Another interesting note: cool meaning "kinda cold" was first used by Shakespeare, who is notable for coining many words that English-speakers use every day.)
¹ http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=dog
² http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=cool
The Online Etymology Dictionary is really fun to browse, if you found this interesting.
Learn more about "PIE" at the Proto Indo European Language Demonstration & Exploration Website.
Geoff's Collection of Sound Changes is cool, if you're into that.
My non-English word examples came from my own knowledge and from Google. If I got any wrong, please correct me.
