Etymology comparisons

Question

We've seen a number of recent questions asking "Why is X in English different than Y in Spanish?" A couple recent examples:

• Why is sport in Spanish 'deporte' and not 'esporte'?
• Origin of 'r' in 'rencontrar'

I see two possible problems with such questions:

1. They assume that English and Spanish ought to be related in some way. While it's true that English and Spanish do have a number of similarities, in large part due to a shared Latin root, assuming that this root should yield similarities between any two given words with a similar meaning seems misguided.

2. These are really two questions, disguised as a single question. The two questions are "What is the etymology of X in English?" and "What is the etymology of Y in Spanish?" And only one of these two questions seems directly on-topic on this site. And the other can be easily asked on EL&U.

   Of course etymology questions may often be closed as too-simple, if the answer is easy enough to find, but that's a separate issue, I believe.

How do others feel?

We already have a related (but I think more broad) question in meta.

Answer 1

My opinion is that such questions ought to be edited to ask only for the etymology of the Spanish word. Questions on the etymology of English words can be asked over at EL&U, if desired.

Note that I have done this already with this question.

If this is not the opinion of the community, we can easily revert my edit.

Answer 2

I found the discussion on "deporte" very helpful (and upvoted some of the answers).

The answer was that the Spanish version a "pure" derivation from the original Latin word while the English was a "corruption."

That was EXACTLY the kind of answer I wanted.

But perhaps in some other cases, it might be the English version that was a direct derivation, and the Spanish version that's indirect.

But the problem is that I don't know ahead of time which version is closer to the original (Latin in this instance), and which is the "deviant."

So I'm not asking about either the Spanish or the English per se, but rather about their RELATION to each other (and to third languages).

Answer 3

I agree that in most cases, mixing two questions like that is not the best for SL&U. As you said, direct Etymology questions to EL&U (if they are good questions, not every single entry... :D eheh)

Comparisons between some etymologies (better if tendencies rather than single words) might be OK for the Linguistics SE site. Before you decide to migrate, though, please ask the moderators.

I don't find it that obvious to compare English and Spanish, however, since they are not close cognates as Spanish would be with Italian or French. Remember that they don't share a common root (Latin), as English belongs to the Germanic family (along with German, Danish, Swedish, and so on).

Answer 4

I think etymology questions are interesting. They help me learn Spanish since I can compare with other languages that I already known.
There are good question like this: latin-f-to-spanish-h
Even if English is not a Romance language, there are some words that are common to both English and Spanish. I don't think the comparisons questions should be closed. Don't questions having translation issues face same problem?
Spanish topics may often interfere with other languages or with other domains. For example, we might have a Spanish question about a term in Chemistry. Would you close it because it's also about Chemistry? I propose a new tag to be created for such questions so that those who answer would know what to expect.