I've been loosely learning Japanese/French/Spanish. I turn on the Memrise app and dedicate 10 minutes towards each language. It's not much, but it's something.
There's also language sites I follow, one of which is Spanishpod101. Still a super beginner, so everything is a revelation, but a picture of words popped up on my feed with Spanish words and their English equivalent with pictures. Suddenly I noticed mountain: Montaña. And I stared at it. Montaña... Montana... Montana has a lot of mountains. :\ It makes so much sense!
And then I felt like a weirdo for suddenly realizing this.
Then I noticed river: Rio. Rio means river. Rio Grande means big river... 0_0 I looked up Rio de Janeiro, Portuguese, but that means January River, all because the explorers reached Rio in January and mistook the bay for a river. It's just so interesting.
Kinda funny hearing stuff all your life and finally making the linguistic connection.
It's also interesting when it comes to naming places in the United States. California has city names ranging from so many places and languages. I few years ago I finally realized Anaheim sounded German. Turns out Anaheim was settled by 50 German families in the 1800's. "Ana" is taken from the Santa Ana River, and "Heim" means home in German. Kinda glad they didn't choose to name the city Santaheim.
Where I grew up had such a cross section of city names and origins. Porterville, due to it being settled by a dude named Porter. Tulare: "The name Tulare comes from the Tule River Indian Tribe of the Tule River Reservation." Then there's Terra Bella, Lindsay, Exeter, Strathmore, Dinuba, and Visalia (named after the founders ancestral home in... Visalia Kentucky). My favorite California beach town is named Cambria, which is the ancient Latin name for Wales, Cymru.
It's all a lot of fun.
Anywho, the family came over this evening and they were going to make smores, but, alas, no one thought to check the weather. We got a giant rainstorm with high altitude lightening and some flash flood warnings in parts of northern Utah. It's all calm now. We still had fun. Got to play Pokemon with the kids, and I taught them some tricks.
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