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Comment by captaincrowbar | Hacker News Reader

My favourite example of apparently unrelated words with an unexpected common root: "government" and "cybernetics" both come from the Greek "kubernetes" (helmsman).

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You start to notice a lot of roots by applying a "toki pona" style phonetic rule: collapse all voiced and unvoiced consonants. Reverse Grimm's law. Th -> t. And then apply Arabic vowels: a, i, u. This is pretty much reversing the most common sound shifts over time.

f=v=b=p, g=k, d=t, y=o=u, e=i.

Cybernetics -> kupirnitics

Government -> kupirnit

It's probably also related to "operatus" (Latin for "work", things like cooperate and opera come from it) but I can't find sources. (co)operatus -> (k)upiratus

Another example is the famous "father" etymology:

Father/vader/pater -> patir (PIE *pH₂tér)

That doesn't seem plausible to me when you consider that opera is the plural of opus. Afaik in early latin, /s/ often went to /r/ when it fell between vowels. That is why it has /s/ in the nominative but /r/ when you start to inflect it with suffices.

This happens a lot for third declension nouns where nominative ends in -s (opus is one such example)

Other examples of this pattern:

Corpus -> corporem (not *corpusem)

Venus -> Venerem (not *Venusem)

Flos -> florem (not *flosem)

Colos -> colorem (not *colosem)

Or more simply, we can look at opus and see it comes from a different PIE root from cyber. (When i look it up, the former has a root meaning "work", and the latter has a root meaning "turn")

I was under the impression that the underlying /r/ became [s] in the nominative case where it was followed by an /s/, rather than -- as you seem to suggest -- an underlying /s/ becoming [r] when intervocalic.

Intervocalic s > r (rhotacism [1]) is a well known phenomenon in early Latin. Any Latin grammar from the last 150 years should mention it.

The comparative method proves the original phoneme was /s/ in many cases:

generis - compare Greek gene(s)os, Sanskrit janasas

jus, juris - compare justitia where the /s/ was not intervocalic

robur (archaic robos), roboris - compare robustus

The 3rd declension has many s-stems like these though there are some original r-stems also like jecur (< PIE jekwor, compare Greek hepar).

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhotacism

How do you explain the prefixed form in Latin (co-operatus) corresponding to the root form in other languages? Opus/operis is a productive form on its own in Latin.

When Latin borrowed the root of "govern" from Greek, it was a nautical term, to steer.

We have a tendency to think of "cy" as an S followed by an "ai" diphthong. But if we consider the "c" as a hard /k/ and the "y" as a vowel similar to /u/, there isn't a huge difference between "cyber" and "guber", the latter form showing up in Latin and ultimately in English words like "gubernatorial".

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