As mentioned before, I'm working my way through the very accessible The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher. I've been reading about a topic I'm fairly familiar with - how consonant changes in English caused us to have two (and occasionally three) different words for the same thing and you probably wouldn't recognize them as having the same root word. To put it as simply as possible - because people are inherently verbally lazy, we eventually took a lot of voiced consonants and made them unvoiced (like b became p) and stops became fricatives (p's became f's.) This chart will help: It's called Grimm's Law. Yes, that Grimm. Now all that is fine and dandy, and the book goes on to give some examples - like how we have the words tooth and dental, and you wouldn't think they were related but, yup, they're from the same root word. Only tooth went through a pronunciation change in England, and dental came along from Latin afterwords and missed the ...