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nephihahayesterday at 3:02 PM1 replyview on HN

Perfectly possible. I think I've seen evidence elsewhere of similar but unrelated words influencing each other. For example, round about where I live the Romany word "shan" is used meaning "mean" or "worthless", but it seems to have been influenced by the unrelated "sean" in Gaelic (also pronounced "shan") which means "old". So it's come to mean something worn out as well.


Replies

BalinKingyesterday at 3:40 PM

In general, I think this phenomenon is called "phono-semantic matching": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phono-semantic_matching.