Jeopardy Question: What English word is descended from Sanskrit medh- honey?
Here’s a Jeopardy question (paraphrased) that goofed on a crucial detail, showing that even these experts need a little linguistics tutorial. The answer is supposed to be English mead (an archaic alcoholic beverage made from fermented honey) which is related to the Sanskrit root for ‘honey’, medh. But from the way the question is phrased, the implication is that English borrowed the word directly from Sanskrit (most Sanskrit words were borrowed in the 19th-20th centuries) and changed to English mead. What really happened is that both Sanskrit and English inherited mead/medh from their parent langauge, Proto-Indo-European, which was spoken in about 4000 BC. It’s a small slip, but one that throws off the timeline by six millenia! In case you’re wondering, Proto-Indo-European is the name for the hypothetical language that spawned most of the languages of Europe and India. Descendants include English, Sanskrit, Russian, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Lithuanian, P
