Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-31481772-20180315020044

I am very glad to present the second Word of the Week post together with  Federico! The god for this week is..... Eros! Eros is the Greek god of love and desire. He is the son of Ares and Aphrodite. His R oman form is Cupid.As you might know, the English words "erotic" and "eroticism", which are used to convey sexual desire, come from his name. Variations of "erotic" occur in the direct descendants of Latin with the same meaning, such as Italian (erotico), French (érotique), Spanish (erótico), Portuguese (erótico) and Romanian (erotic - some Romanian user please correct us if we are wrong!).

The word "Eros" comes from the Greek word "eramai", meaning "I love". Some linguists believe that "eramai" also comes from the same ancestor language that we mentioned in the earlier post. Linguists call it Proto-Indo-European (PIE for short). The root word is believed to be "hrem", which means "to rest, to relax". Some other descendants of PIE would also have similar words with similar meanings. Indeed, Lithuanian has "rimti", which means "to calm down". I believe that the Persian/ Urdu word "aaraam", which means "rest", but is also used in the sense of "pleasing", also comes from the same root word.

We also found a related word in Sanskrit, "ramate", meaning "to rest". One amazing thing we discovered is that this word has an important role in ancient Indian culture. The name of the Hindu god Rama, which means "pleasing, lovely" is derived from this word. The word "mano-rama", meaning "mind-pleasing", is a common word and name in many Indian languages as well.

Thank you for reading this post! We would like you to try and find other words related to "eros", "hrem", "ramate", "aaraam", etc. in languages you know. If you do find some words, please comment them below! 