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From Proto-Baltic *widu-, from Proto-Indo-European *widʰu- (“forest, wood”). The semantic change from “forest” to “region, area (between villages)” and to “middle, between” probably comes from a situation in which the areas between villages are mostly occupied by forest (cf. the opposite change, from “middle” to “forest,” in Latvian mežs; these two words, mežs and vidus apparently swapped their meanings).
JohnBrooke wrote:it came from Anglo-Norman French salarie, from Latin salarium, originally denoting a Roman soldier's allowance to buy salt, from sal ‘salt’.
linguoboy wrote:Modern Anatolian Turkish for "asparagus" is kuşkonmaz, a compound of kuş "bird" and the negative aorist of konmak "perch", i.e. "birds don't perch [on it]".
It's quite unusual to see any name for asparagus that doesn't ultimately derive from Greek ἀσπάραγος. About the only other examples I can think of are Chinese 蘆筍 (lit. "reed bamboo.shoot") and Vietnamese măng tây ("Western bamboo.shoot").
Ashucky wrote:Slovene has two synonyms for "asparagus", one is špargelj, borrowed from German and ultimately from Greek, and there is also the native word beluš, which is derived from bel "white".
Homine.Sardu wrote:while normally the donkey is called "àinu" (Latin "asinus").
vijayjohn wrote:Dushanbe means 'Monday' in Tajik (and Persian more generally) and was named that way because it used to be a village where Monday was the market day.
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