The word ‘phantom’ stems from the same root as ‘photo’, ‘phase’, ‘phenomenon’, ‘fantasy’, and ‘fancy’.

The reconstructed meaning of this root is “to shine”.

Many words were derived from it.

It’s their Ancient Greek descendants that ultimately became the words above.

On their journeys – some of which went through Latin and Old French – their forms and meanings changed.

Zoom in on my new infographic to learn all about this fantastic word family.

There are people who stigmatise the use of ‘to ax’ as a variant of ‘to ask’.

However, ‘to ax’ is at least 1200 years old. It stems from Old English ‘ācsian’ with /ks/, a very frequent variant of ‘āscian’ with /sk/. Later, writers such as Chaucer used both ‘axen’ and ‘asken’.

Swapping two sounds, as happened with /sk/ > /ks/, is called metathesis.

My infographic shows more examples of metathesis in English and some of its Germanic sister languages. Dutch is the absolute queen of metathesis.

The English word ‘shirt’ has the same origin as ‘skirt’.

While ‘shirt’ directly stems from Proto-Germanic *skurtijōn, ‘skirt’ was borrowed from its Old Norse descendant.

Here’s number 10 in my doublet series: English doublets with a Germanic origin.

Tomorrow: German.

I started this series with English doublets that have a Latin origin. Here’s the link to that post:
https://toot.community/@yvanspijk/115747696277790852

A lot of English words ultimately stem from Latin. But did you know there are Latin words that ended up in English two times - in two different forms?

One example is 'trāditiōnem': it became both 'treason' and 'tradition'. Pairs like this are called doublets.

Here's the first installment in my ten-part series on doublets.

Over the next nine days, you'll see charts with doublets in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, Galician, Dutch, and lastly English again.