Surprising Etymology of Russian words

One of the first Russian words that seems to be taught is пальто, perhaps because it’s a good example of a indeclinable word, though personally I prefer радио as an example.  My teachers have always said that it’s indeclinable because it’s a borrowed word ending in о and those are usually considered indeclinable, as are  place names ending in о like Чикаго or  Сан Франсиско.  Anyway, I’ve asked every Russian teacher what language and word does this comes from, and they all have said, “Я не знаю!“.  But thanks to Wikipedia, I have my answer.

From French paletot < Spanish paletoque (“mantlet, short cape”) < Latin palla (“long outer garment”).

Wikipedia also offers a suggestion for the other often asked etymology, “Where in the heck does “сорок” come from?

Borrowed from Greek τεσσαράκοντα (40 in Greek) as a result of Russian trade in Byzantium.  τεσσαράκοντα is pronounced like tessarákonta, so it looks like they borrowed the middle of the word (tessarákonta) and it became “сорок”.

My current Russian teacher says that спасибо was originally спаси бог, literally “god save”.  So when you were thanking someone, you were asking god’s blessing for that person.

Of course Russian has thousands of borrowed words, as do all languages.  The French ones kind of stand out when you look at them in Russian, because they just don’t look like Russian words, for example пляж from the French word plage.  But because it ends in a consonant, we can go ahead and decline it as a masculine noun.

And I found this interesting story here

My favorite etymology story is for the Russian slang word дыбр (dybr).

For those who are not aware, all Russian computer users maintain 2 keyboard layouts: the Russian layout (йцукен), and the English (qwerty) layout (required since one frequently needs to use the Latin alphabet, e.g. for entering URLs). To switch between them, you use a keyboard shortcut (canonically, Alt Shift). And the crucial thing to keep in mind is, the two layouts are completely different.

So, suppose you are typing in the Russian word “дневник” (diary). Except you were just using the qwerty layout to type something in the Latin alphabet, forgot to press Alt Shift to switch back to Russian, and so instead of дневник you get lytdybr.

Well, that sounds like a promising word! Let’s transcribe it phonetically, letter by letter, back into Russian: лытдыбр.

Except the syllable “лыт” sounds unnatural in Russian. Let’s throw it away.

So we are left with дыбр — meaning, a blog post or webpage of a diary-like nature and of limited interest to the general public.

Any other interesting etymologies to add?  If so, please comment!