| Quote: | |  | |
| latin sol(m), greek helios(m)
latin luna(f), greek selene(f)
german sonne(f), mond(m)
i think the problem is that german is PIE based so it has no written records or other way to infer etymology of words.  | |
| | |
actually, most European languages, and this includes both the Germanic and Latin families, are descended from common roots. Linguists believe that all these languages and some others besides are derived from a common language or group of related languages they call Indo-European because they spanned an area including India and Europe.
The obvious commonalities between the words you mention above are a good illustration of this. Other commonly cited similarities are Vater (German) / Pater (Latin) Mutter (German) / Mater (Latin) etc etc.
The fact that genders seem to have flipped between languages over the years, and in fact even the number of genders seems to have changed (3 in German, 2 in Latin, 1 in English etc) shows that the concept of gender isn't as deeply embedded as the language itself.
There are even words that flip genders between high and Swiss German, Tram is one that comes to mind,