I always wondered how "inshallah" became "ojalá". The 'j' sound in 'ojala' is the same as in 'pájaro' which in Ladino-as the article points out--is "pasharo" thus supplying the explanation.
How do you say "you" in Ladino? Is "usted" (possibly from Arabic "ustaad") used, or do they use an Italian or Portuguese cognate?
Maybe. But this is not generally agreed upon by Romance linguists. The more generally accepted etymology connects to the name of the Biblical Maccabees. The OED says:
"The Middle French word occurs first in Jean le Fèvre's Respit de la Mort (1376), where the author says ‘Je fis de Macabré la dance’: this is apparently a claim to have written a work called la danse Macabré. In form the word might be a popular alteration of Old French Macabé Maccabaeus (examples of Judas Macabré(s) occur at the end of the 12th cent.): see Französisches etymol. Wörterbuch at Macchabeus for investigation of the range of forms and spellings attested in Middle French for both the present word and for words and expressions independently derived from the biblical proper name. As regards meaning, it may be connected with the late medieval liturgical dance or procession called chorea Machabaeorum in Latin (Besançon, 1453) and in Middle Dutch Makkabeusdans (15th cent.), which has been explained as arising from 2 Maccabees 7: Französisches etymol. Wörterbuch suggests also the association of the liturgical office of the dead with 2 Maccabees 12:43–6 in the Vulgate (verses 43–5 in the King James Bible) as a reason for a link between a cult of the Maccabees and the dance of the dead tradition in art and literature. In Middle French the metaphor aller a la dance De Macabré ‘to die’ is found in the 15th cent.
A less likely explanation is that Macabré was the name of the artist who painted the picture which suggested the first poem on the subject.
There is no evidence to support the theory that the word derives from Arabic maqābir, plural of maqbara cemetery (Moroccan colloquial Arabic məqāber, plural of məqebra tomb), or from Syriac meqabberēy gravediggers. For summaries of further explanations which have been advanced see Trésor de la langue française at macabre, Französisches etymol. Wörterbuch at Macchabeus."
You might enjoy, as I did, this explanation of why X is the unknown quantity in Algebra: another case where "sh" got marked as 'x' which is pronounced the same as 'j'. https://www.ted.com/talks/terry_moore_why_is_x_the_unknown
It's a bit of a just-so-story without much in the way of evidence though though, so there's a rebuttal here https://gizmodo.com/why-we-use-x-as-the-unknown-in-math-1657...
It's actually interesting how the left and right have such a strong figurative meaning to them, left being bad (sinister, gauche, etc...) and right being... well, righteous. It's embedded deeply in our languages.
There are a few possible explanations here, regarding sinister:
French also uses “manquer”, and there are traces in spanish (such as a manco being a person that lacks an arm).
Meanwhile French "manquer" and Italian "mancare" seem to come "From Latin mancus, from Proto-Indo-European *man-ko- (“maimed in the hand”)."
Actually we still have "manchot" in modern French to mean one-armed which I always assumed came from "manche" (sleeve) but seems to actually have a different etymology.
That's all sourced from the wiktionary by the way.
"Sleeve" in Portuguese is "manga", which in turn is also the word for mango, the fruit. The Latin "manica" meant "sleeve", while the name of the fruit originally comes from an Indian language, into English, via the Portuguese.
Etymology is quite the rabbit hole!
More italian matches:
* fazer -> fare (which is irregular and declined like the verb was "facere") * roza -> rosa (with a [z] sounding s) * djente -> gente (with both dj and g sounding [dʒ])
Nope, in (Brazillian) portuguese "mórbido" means morbid, like in english, and never means soft (suave, macio).
Mancare in Italian is to miss/need/be lacking, and although mancar in modern Portuguese is to limp, archaic Portuguese used it in the Italian sense.
> I had to listen carefully to understand, hearing words like fazer (to do) and lavorar (to work) that sounded more like Portuguese and Italian than modern Spanish. I heard sounds like "dj" [dʒ] in the word, djente (people), “z” [z] in the word roza (rose) and “sh” [ʃ] in the word pasharo (bird) that don’t exist at all in modern European Spanish.
Other direct matches and similarities: Fazer - To do (Portuguese), lavorare - to work (Italian), djente - people (Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation of gente), pássaro - bird (Portuguese). Even the z in roza, for rose, is typical of Portuguese pronunciation.
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Not related to the article but something I always found odd: In Italian, 'morbido' means 'soft' (used to describe food, among other things), while the English 'morbid' is translated as 'macabro'. Italian etymological references say this is due to the softness of diseased muscles, and it somehow just became 'soft'. All of the other Romance languages use the term in its original meaning.