History of English Podcast is so interesting. The guy is a lawyer in Raleigh with and interest in linguistics and planned on 100 episodes from proto-Indo-European language til now. Well, he's 110 episodes in and we're at around year 1300 and Edward I. He weaves actual history into the history of the language and this last episode he talked about how wool essentially ran the English economy back then (really not as boring as it sounds). Most interesting thing I learned today is that map, apron and napkin all sprang from the same root word: mappa in Latin
A mappa was a smallish piece of cloth that you would write directions on, so 'map'. The word passed to French and the 'm' evolved into an 'n', so 'nappa'. Still meant a small piece of cloth and it was used to keep a table clean, a tablecloth. 'Nappa' passed into English once the French started coming into England in droves. The Old English suffix 'kin' meant small and they added it to 'nappa' to create 'napkin' for a small piece of cloth that you would clean things with. The French 'nappa' evolved to 'naperon' in French to essentially mean napkin and came over from the continent. At the same time, English began to use indefinite articles 'a' and 'an', so you would use 'a naperon' to keep things clean. People ended up being confused as to whether it was 'a naperon' or 'an aperon' and the 2nd stuck and 'an apron' is used to keep your clothes clean when you are cooking, so:
map, apron and napkin all come from the same root word. I thought that was very neat.
