I’ve been asked many times what’s the difference between a crow and a raven, and my answer was that crow is the species in general and raven is a male specimen, something like sheep and ram. However, I never felt perfectly satisfied with this answer, until one day I found out that the Icelandic word for raven is “hrafna”, and then it clicked – they come from two completely different languages, raven is the Norse “hrafna”, and crow is the Latin “corvus”.
I apologize in advance if you learned about this in kindergarten or elementary school, but it’s actually new to me. 🙂 The same goes with the names of the days of the week, where some are obvious, but I didn’t really get the etymology of others until recently:
Sunday – Sun
Monday – Moon
Tuesday – TĂw (old English for Norse TĂ˝r), the one-armed god of war
Wednesday – WĹŤden/Wotan (old English for Odin)
Thursday – Thor
Friday – Freya
Saturday – Saturni dies, Latin