Umbrella

The two languages I speak are English and Norwegian, and both have a mess of influences. I grew up thinking about umbrellas as being for rain. At some point, I learned that you can get an umbrella for the sun and that's called a parasol. When I learned Norwegian, I learned that they called an umbrella a paraply. In the last year or so, I learned that umbrella in French is parapluie and I was really surprised that Norwegian had taken the French word. Sol in Norwegian made sun so parasoll always made sense to me, but I had just assumed that paraply was some niche Norwegian word and that I didn't understand where it originated from. I had had no idea that Norwegian borrowed from French.

Then I started wondering about umbrella. Why don't we call them paraplys or parapluies? Turns out umbrella comes from a different Latin word than parasol/parapluie: umbra. And umbra means to shade or protect from the sun! So English took a French word for protection from the sun (which originally came from Latin) and a Latin word for protection from the sun, and then chose one of them to actually be about rain, even though there was already a French word for protection from the rain. How odd!

When I was thinking about umbrellas and paraplys and parasols and all that I started wondering about parachutes, because it's a similar word. Turns out it's also French, meaning that it is protection from falling. How logical. So I checked what parachute is in Norwegian, and Norwegian borrows it from German rather than French, getting fallskjerm! I looked into the German versions, and, similar to the French, they're all quite logical: sun protection, rain protection, fall protection. So why did Norwegian not take the full set from French? It's a pretty Germanic language, why didn't they take the full set from German? At this point, I expect this kind of chaos from English, but I'm disappointed in Norwegian...

Anyway, here is a little visualization showing the connections between these words in these languages. Thank you for entertaining my small obsession! :)