Why do some Spanish/English words share the same multiple meanings?

Submitted ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Bunnylux@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

For example, in English the word right (opposite of left) and right (privileges, as in human rights) are homonyms. In Spanish, derecho/a also means both of those things. Don’t the concepts behind those words predate the cross-pollination of the two languages? Why do they share this homonym quality?

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FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Wait ‘till OP finds out that Sinister was originally the word for “left”

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- AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Meanwhile, the French word for left is “gauche”.
  
  Which leads to a famous quip from a Canadian conservative politician some decades ago: “the Canadian left is more gauche than sinister”
  
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- Calanthesrose@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  You just blew my mind. Thank you for that. Also indirectly introduced me to a way to learn a new word a day.
  
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Beefytootz@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I don’t recall all of the fun fine details of it, but waaaaaaaay back when, there was a math nerd who was also just as much of a religious nut. He’s the main idea behind why graphs work the way they do. Up and to the right is good, where as down and the left is bad. The direction right became synonymous with godliness and the left direction was for evil, just like up and down. In a weird way, math is hella religious

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- FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Right hands became right because most people used them for dexterous tasks- they were correct. Left hands were ‘sinister’- as in the opposite of correct(more accurately: contrary/false/unfavorable. It comes from the Latin sinister which was the opposite of “dexter”,)
  
  Charts were left-to-right in large part because most of the languages/alphabets in surrounding the chart were also left to right- Greek and Latin alphabets come to mind. (Arabic would be a noted exception. IIRC Asian alphabets tend to write top down first.)
  
  I assume that most languages were written left to right simply because it was cleaner- ask a lefty about their troubles. Left to right and top to bottom keeps your hand from going over and maybe smudging freshly written text for a right handed person.
  
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- someguy3@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  That doesn’t sound right (heh). Left to right was probably from writing being left to right. Up for increasing number just seems natural, maybe because we build up from the ground, stack things up from the bottom.
  
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  - AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’m guessing that in texts in right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew, graphs would be drawn the other way around, the X axis increasing leftward.
    
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neptune@dmv.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I think the short answer is that we all speak “Latin” and the various empires, especially Roman, spread cultural concepts across Europe that would be durable for some degree for centuries.

Counterpoint, there are also plenty of false cognates between any given European languages.

There is also convergence, as another commentor pointed out. If something is invented in the US in 1970, or introduced to the US in 1970, there’s a good chance people aren’t going to give it a name in their language: they will just call it what it was called to them.

I don’t think “loan words” explain your example, but you can imagine that if what is now Spain and France had the same rulers, they’d develop similar legal culture later on, and then if France conquered what is now England, that eventually English would inehrit specific quirks common to Spanish

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bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
You might find this video interesting:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1houMl12OU

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machinin@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I have done professional and amateur translation work in a couple of different languages. In addition to what others say, it seems like many languages go through a type of convergent evolution. For people who live in completely different cultures, with completely different histories and values, it is amazing to see how many words expressing abstract concepts can be exact translations in almost every way. It is just my intuition, but I believe translators play a key in a language’s evolution.

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