Last week's Italian words featured sedersi (to sit). It comes directly from Latin and if you look at English you can see how it has become seated in the language. Here are a few examples and thanks to the Online Etymology Dictionary which provided the examples. Take my descriptions with a pinch of salt:
saddle - seat for a rider.
sediment - what you find at the bottom of a bottle of wine or a pond/river to describe the stuff that has settled on the bottom.
residence - where your bottom keeps returning to, your home.
sedentary - remaining on your bottom in one place.
obsess - literally 'to sit opposite to'. In other words never moving the bottom of your mind from one fixed spot.
Eisteddfod - 'annual assembly of Welsh bards'. They obviously sat together on their bahookeys.
4 comments:
"Session" is a pretty good translation of "eisteddfod", or "sitting" to use a less latinate term.
But "saddle" is not related to these Latin words to do with sitting, and I'll fight the man who says it is.
So, Harry, how does saddle fit in?
It doesn't, etymologically speaking, at least not with your Latin examples. OED reckons "a direct connection with the Germanic base of SIT presents formal difficulties". Then again if you believe SADDLE is related to SIT at a Proto-Indo-European level you can throw in all sorts of stuff from SIEGE to ASSIDUOUS to SEWER to SOOT ("that which settles") to, apparently, UPANISHAD.
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