I while ago I made a post asking why the words count and recount(tell a story for hebbrew) were similar. I was just wondering, in hebrew to cut someone's hair also comes from the same root. Does anyone have any idea's why?

Yafa lots of words in the modern English comes French ,which were borrowed and slightly changed. French got it's source from Latin and Greek.

So "conter" means in French "to tell"

"Compter"(pronounced identically) means to "count"...

So try to imagine yourself centuries ago when the English invaded by the Normands and their cultures were trying to put it all together.

Now as far as those words being similar to Hebrew , my knowledge on language do not extend to that point.Could Hebrew roots and Latin roots have similarity coming from way back? I don't know.

Putting "re" in front of many verbs in French means to do it again ...ie: compter recompter .to count and recount!

Recount comes to us from Old Norman French 'reconter' and means 'to relate, narrate, give a detailed account of an event...' says the Oxford English Dictionary. 'Account' is the clue, here, to its relationship to 'count'; 'count' is from Old French 'co(u)nte, modern 'compte' and is closely related to modern 'conte' 'a tale'. It is easy to see how a book of accounts gives a detailed history, the story, of a business' finances and its keeping of the books. The same Latin ancestor has given rise to both ( 'computo'sometimes 'conputo' :'reckon, count up' ). 'Cut' though is from a different language. It comes to us directly from Old English and is related to Norwegian 'cutte' and Icelandic 'cuta' 'cut with a little knife'.

Yafa: I posted an answer to your original question about count and recount
here.

As I explained there, the words for counting and telling (a story) are related in most Indo-European languages. Moreover, the strictly Germanic words tell and retell bear the same relationship as do count and recount. The words tell, toll, tale, told, tolled, telling,e.g., are all reflexes of the same underlying stem. The German word zahlen is cognate with English tell and it means to count, while the derived word erzählen means to tell (a story).

That the words for telling numbers and telling tales would be similarly related in other languages and other language families, like Semitic, is not very surprising. See my link above for a suggestion about why this may be so. I would be very surprised, however, to find that the Hebrew root for cut was related etymologically to the root meaning to count or to recount. This is most likely a mere accident. After all, most Hebrew words are based on simple triconsonantal roots. Since there are only so many consonants to go around, it is to be expected that the same triconsonantal pattern would sometimes, even often, appear in entirely unrelated roots.

[This message was edited by maiku on 04-09-03 at 08:16 AM.]