Post #1781585

2026-04-29 16:50 UTC

The word ‘king’ has a fascinating story to tell. Its Proto-Germanic ancestor *kuningaz was derived from the word *kunjan, which became English ‘kin’. A king was a descendant of royal or divine kin. The word *kunjan, in turn, stemmed from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to produce”. This root, through Latin and Greek, gave us many words, including ‘genre’, ‘nature’, ‘genital’, ‘genesis’, ‘pregnant’, and ‘gonorrhea’. Zoom in on my new graphic to learn more: 1/

Replies (6)

@yvanspijk@toot.community 2026-04-29 16:50

2/ The early Germanic cognates of ‘king’ were borrowed into the Finnic and Slavic languages, becoming Finnish ‘kuningas’ (king), Polish ‘ksiądz’ (priest), Serbo-Croatian ‘knez’ (prince) and many others.

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@NatureMC@mastodon.online 2026-04-29 16:54

@yvanspijk The connection between 'king' and gonorrhea is great. #nokings

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@at@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-29 16:58

@yvanspijk Interesting that it’s got the meaning ‘priest’ in West Slavic and East Baltic; is that a shared later development?

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@bartavi@mastodon.nl 2026-04-29 17:12

@yvanspijk waar is die 'g' gebleven in 'natio' en 'natura'?

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@sjcooke66@mastodon.social 2026-04-29 17:59

@yvanspijk Given today's 'Divine Right' political fuckery, I'm most interested in the proto-IndoEuropean links to generation in this graphic which may explain why I prefer to refer to the majority of Politicians as sounding like 'count' but lacking the 'O'!

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@d10c@hachyderm.io 2026-04-30 15:03

@yvanspijk Classical Chinese also had a ‘kinship’ between royalty and kin: 子 means child, master, viscount among other things.

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