جان. Written, it's jān. Said in Tehran, it's joon, and it goes on the end of a name: Maryam-joon, māmān-joon. There it means dear. The noun itself means soul, life. Someone calls your name and you answer joonam?, "my soul?", which is a warm way of saying "yes?"

Middle Persian had gyān, soul (no relation to Hindi gyān, knowledge). The same gy- to j- change turned gyāg, place, into jā. The standard etymology splits gyān into a prefix plus a reconstructed Iranian root meaning to breathe. Sanskrit put the same two pieces together in vyāna, the name of one of the body's vital breaths. Behind both is the Indo-European root that also gave Greek anemos, wind, and Latin anima, breath, soul.

To be careful: jān doesn't mean breath, and as far as I can find it never did. The breathing is in the root. It also wasn't always the accepted story. Nineteenth-century etymologists proposed other origins.

Interestingly, Middle Persian made a word for animal out of gyān, and Persian still says jānvar, roughly "soul-haver." Latin made animal out of anima. Two languages making the same move with the same old root, and no borrowing either way.

If you know jaan from Urdu and Hindi, that one is a loan from Persian.

I grew up understanding Persian and answering in English. I only went digging after stumbling upon this rabbit hole while learning more about the language so i could build Farsi-Jan.

This Sunday afternoon I was in the small city of Duffel, close to Antwerp(en), Belgium.

What a coincidence: Duffel cloth ... Duffel bag ... Duffel coat.

Oh ... not a coincidence at all ... from Wikipedia:

The town gives its name to a type of heavy woolen cloth generally used to make blankets and overcoats, especially for the armed forces, and a type of luggage. In the Middle Ages, an important part of the region's industry was the manufacturing of Flemish laken (a broadcloth), while the cloth produced in Duffel was a thicker variation. The manufacturing process was brought to England by Flemish emigrants in the 1500s. The name for the cloth was so well-known, a type of overcoat made from the cloth and manufactured in England received the name Duffel coat.

Hey! Y'know how the word knight (and other kn- English words) have a silent K because it used to be pronounced but eventually the [k] got dropped but the letter stayed in our spelling? Does anyone know of a scholarly source that states this? Of course the OED and other etymology resources have the old spellings but I can't find anything specifically on the pronunciation that is reliable enough to be cited. Thanks for your help!

I was researching the history of fools and on the 1828 websters dictionary it seems to connect fools to idiots or idiotic behavior (i.e. the term for the mentally disabled at the time). There were a couple articles from britanica and wikipedia that talked about natrual fools/fool born, people who had intellectual disabilities (or in UK terms a learning disability) and their use as entertainers in Europe since at least the Tudor era. The connection also seems to extend to the bible with the "holy fool", which I'm giving conflicting results as to whether it means those with/who feigned mental disability and/or mental illness or just mental disability for the lord.

How connected was the idea of foolishness to mentally disability?

Was it a medical term first (a la the word idiot)?

Was it connected to other mental illnesses like schizophrenia, ocd, or other forms of insanity?

When most people used the term fool, were they implying a resemblance to a mentally disabled person? When did this connection end?

I keep seeing it on Tiktok and I'm wondering what it means.