Oxygen
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Root
chacha
to be sour, to turn acid, to ferment sharply
Oxygen descends through Greek oxys, sour, to Shona chacha, to turn acid
- Confidence
- 44/100
- Root language
- Shona
- Descent begins
- oxygenEnglish
The consensus position
Mainstream comparative linguistics holds that oxygen is a late eighteenth-century neoclassical coinage by Lavoisier, French oxygene, from Ancient Greek oxys 'sharp, acid' plus the formant -genes 'producing', reflecting the mistaken theory that the gas was the acidifying principle. Both Greek elements go back to Proto-Indo-European, oxys to the sharpness root and -genes to *genh1-, with no connection to any Bantu language.
The working behind this.
The full descent — 8 links from the attested form down to the root — the segment-by-segment correspondences, the phonological breakdown and the case for the derivation are behind an account.
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