Issue 165, page 1 |Search||Home||FAQ||Links||Site map||Book
Store||New||Ask Us||Theory||About| We have little to discuss
this week. Perhaps we should re-phrase that... This week, we are
going to look at words that evolved from the Indo-European root
*pau- which meant "little". To many ears, the pronunciation of
the letter P is very similar to an F (hence the use of PH) and
often, when a word passes from one language to another, Fs
become Ps and vice versa. With this in mind it is easy to see
that the Old English feawe "few" and our Modern English few are
direct descendants of *pau-. The Latin paucus, "little, few" is
more obviously descended from *pau-. This Latin word has given
paucity to English and poco "little" to Spanish. There is an
Afro-Caribbean religion called Pocomania, the name of which is
usually interpreted as "a little madness" though it is probable
that its true origin is an African word. The IE root *pau- shows
up in other Latin words such as parvum, "little" and pauper
(pronounced pow-pair) w