My linguistic center of gravity is, of course, western Europe. Thus, I have always expected the word for car to be some derivative of automobile. Auto, auto, auto -- even the Russian word transliterates as avtomobil. All seemed right with the world. Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that the Polish word is samochód. Whats going on here, I thought -- why wasnt Polish following the usual formula? Why was it being different? As I learned more of the language, I realized something intriguing. The Polish word samo means itself or by itself. The Polish word chodzić means to go (Polish is actually quite rich in verbs describing motion). All of a sudden, it hit me: samochód means, effectively, self-mover, which makes total sense for a car. You know what else literally means self-mover? Automobile.
Posted on: Thu, 28 Aug 2014 16:54:32 +0000
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