Recently in Linguistics Category

We were talking about a "morsel" of food while making a huge mess in the kitchen. Anyone who knows Latin could probably guess that the English word morsel has the Latin verb mordeo somewhere in its history. And of course mordeo means 'I bite' and its noun form is morsus. Without getting overly academically investigative about the origin of the word, my best guess is that morsel is dervied from a Latin diminutive of morsus, morsellus.

The notion of a bite has long been used as a metaphor indicate a small amount, as in the English word "bit" and the German word Bißchen and the French word morceau  a 'piece (of something)' (both derived from diminutives as well), but without an etymological dictionary handy and armed with some knowledge of historical sound changes, I'll guess that "morsel" entered the English lexicon from Norman Old French after said Normans conquered England in the 11th century. It was unlikely to have arrived later due to the modern French development which resulted in final /l/ becoming /u/. Of course that wouldn't stop the word entering then and later on, such as leal/loyal/legal and real/royal/regal (Norman/Modern French/Latin).

By the way, Mexican Spanish mordida '(a) bite' is also '(a) bribe'.

Anyway, I'm going to use the word 'morsel' as a category in my blog for the scattered thoughts that I have that might be of vague interest to someone.