Lisa! said:
So there are some words that are the same in different language and I want to know where these wods come from. Do they enter a culture and language from the other or they just happen to be the same in different languages?
I think there are three main ways that different natural languages can come to have similar words: (1) genetic relationship, (2) borrowing, and (3) coincidence.
1. Genetic Relationship
Suppose that you have a large group of people that speak the same language; call this language
Mother. If you leave this group alone and come back many years later, you might find that Mother has accumulated changes and is no longer really the same language -- it's evolved into a new language; call this one
Child. Of course, Child will still be similar to Mother and their genetic relationship should leave regular clues, including word similarities.
Suppose again that you have a large group of people that speak the same language, Mother. If you
separate this group into two groups (say, put some of them on a remote island) and come back many years later, you might find that, as before, neither group is speaking Mother anymore, but now the two languages of the two groups also differ from each other. So you have two new languages,
Child 1 and
Child 2. Both Child languages will of course be similar to each other for the same reasons that they are similar to Mother. The words of Child 1 and Child 2 that evolved from a common ancestor word in Mother are called cognates.
This basic process of separation and divergence has happened, for example, relatively recently with Latin (mother) and Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan (children).
2. Borrowing
Borrowing is just when two language communities happen to come into contact with each other (possibly through written materials in addition to contact through speech) and steal words from each other. This happened a lot with English borrowing from Latin (and French). English is not a child of Latin. (English is a Germanic language.) I think other common examples of this are the names of goods and services being exported along with the goods and services themselves. I think
tea and
coffee and all of their variants are examples of this. Taking a look at the names of some of the foods in your kitchen should give you some more examples.
3. Coincidence
Coincidence isn't as interesting unless you want to get into the relationships between language, the human brain, and related phenomena (which wouldn't really make them 'coincidences' anymore anyway).
You can learn more about language change and relationships by searching for historical linguistics, diachronic linguistics, comparative method, and dialectology.
Anyway Does anyone know where kodus comes from?
What language is it from? Did you mean 'kudos'?
EDIT
You can look up etymologies at the
Online Etymology Dictionary (also, many dictionaries include brief etymology information when available). Here's the
entry for 'kudos'.
