Friday, November 13, 2020

Words in Our Language from Persia

In working with a child today on her map of Persia (she chose to make a map of modern-day Iran and not the full extent of the Ancient Persian Empire at its height... which was significant), we ended up talking about the country name "Turkey" and we looked up < turkey > in etymonline to see why the bird and the country have the same name although they are found in completely different parts of the world. Which is an interesting thing to look up. Hint: It's all about trade routes (and also a mistake that stuck).

And then we saw Turk again in "Turkmenistan." Aha! And we knew that Turk is from French, Medieval Latin, Byzantine Greek, and goes back as far as Persian. Carries a meaning of strength, beautiful youth, barbarian, or robber.

Putting "Persian" in the search box of etymonline yielded 32 pages of words that are either directly from, or connected in some way to, this language. Here are a few entries that I found really interesting. You may like to explore some as part of your study of Ancient Persia!


Food


Clothing


Household Items


Animals


Gems, Minerals, Pigments & Powders


Miscellaneous


Again, you can see trade routes figure prominantly here, so this etymology exploration would also be a good topic of study if you had a mixed-age homeschool family and a fifth grader was doing Ancient Persia and a third grader was doing Trade Goods & Currency and studying the Silk Road. As Doug says, you can't learn about etymology without learning history as well!

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)