While building my Spanish vocabulary, I often establish words in my memory by connecting them to similar words in other languages. I lean most heavily on English, but also think about other words in Spanish, French, as well as Tagalog, Latin, and Greek. There are so many examples: vinagre is clearly related to English (vinegar) as well as French (vinaigre), being derived from Latin (vinum acer) — wine gone sour.
However, I occasionally run into false friends — words that appear similar but have different meanings: embarazada means pregnant (not embarrassed, which is avergonzado); decepcionado means disappointed (not deceptive, which is engañoso). Some false friends are also false cognates — words that appear the same but have different etymological origins.

Aceite is both false friend and false cognate. On first meeting the word, I expected it to mean something sour: acid, acrid, acetic. When teaching chemistry, in the back of my mind I sometimes think about the strangeness of a molecule having the name “acetic acid” — it’s a duplication like “heat transfer” (heat already being a transfer of energy), “ATM machine” (M already standing for machine), or “PIN number” (N already standing for number). For a while I thought “Potomac River” also involved a strange duplication, but the place name (Patawomeck) in Algonquian is unrelated to the word for river (ποταμός or “potamós”) in Greek.

Aceite is a very confusing false friend, because it is the Spanish word for oil, not for vinegar. Oil and vinegar are culinary opposites!

How can this be? I had expected the Spanish word for oil would look something like English or French. Trying to explain this anomaly to myself, I initially speculated aceite might refer to the sharp peppery overtones of high-quality olive oil. But the truth can be found in its etymology:

Aceite comes from Arabic, not Latin. The word is a reflection of the tapestry of cultures that have inhabited the landscape of Spain. Our family witnessed this in the Muslim influence on architecture during our visit to Andalusia (Andalucía) two years ago.

However, the adoption of this particular Arabic word into Spanish doesn’t make complete sense to me. After all, Iberia was part of the Roman Empire; some olive trees in Spain are two thousand years old, which predates the Muslim era by centuries. For many generations, the people living there harvested olives and consumed the oil, presumably referring to this central foodstuff in Vulgar Latin or Latin (oleum) — a word that has spread all around the region to be adopted by English (oil), French (huile), Italian (olio), Portuguese (óleo), Romanian (ulei), and German (Öl).

I could understand if the people had taken up “oleum” and “azeyte” as synonyms for oil, or differentiated between the words depending on circumstances. For example, in English we use Anglo-Saxon words for animals (steer and cow, sheep, chicken, pig) and Norman French words for food (beef viz. boeuf, mutton viz. mouton, poultry viz. poulet, pork viz. porc). And in Tagalog there are counting numbers used for most situations, but Spanish-derived counting numbers are used to tell time, which I suppose tells us something about the Filipino relationship to time before (as well as after) colonization.

However, instead of aceite being introduced as a parallel word for oil, it somehow completely supplanted “oleum”. I still have questions — I always have questions.

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Resources:

• Etymology (English): Online Etymology Dictionary
• Etymology (Spanish): Etymological Dictionary of Spanish [added]
• Etymology (multiple languages): Etymologeek
• Translation (Spanish): SpanishDict
• Translation (numerous languages): Google Translate

On Duolingo, friends can be “following” and/or they can be “followers”: in the language of graph theory, everyone’s friendship network is a digraph. That is, following someone is completely independent of being followed, which reflects the reality of human relationships, as in the lyric to Nature Boy (“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return”) and the Song of Solomon (“I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine…”)

As of this moment, I follow 17 other Duolingo accounts — people whom I know in real life, some with more than one login. On the other hand, 190 Duolingo accounts follow me. I don’t mind that my account is public; as far as I know, all Duolingo accounts are public, so everyone can follow anyone else. “Friendship” in Duolingo is noncommittal and nonintrusive; for example, you can’t send personalized messages to friends. I think the only reason to define a friend on the platform is to monitor someone else’s language progress and encourage each other to use Duolingo more.

Why are complete strangers following me, especially when I don’t interact with them at all? On a spot check of other accounts, this heavily weighted ratio of followers-to-following (11 to 1) is unique in my Duolingo friend network.

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One possibility is that I have posted very occasionally on the forums, and maybe people follow me because they like my questions and responses. But I am far from active on the platform in that way.

Another possibility is that my account appear near the top of the 121485 results when someone looks for a friend with the search term “Alba.” I do appear at the very top of my own search for “Alba” but that could easily be personalized. While I don’t know what factors into the sort algorithm for searches, I think I would rank high in terms of reasonable metrics such as exact character match (@Alba), account age (a very early adopter from almost exactly ten years ago, since 2022-03-31), number of followers (190), consistent activity (387 day streak),and total XP (132174). I also previously subscribed to Duolingo Plus, and maybe during those two years Duolingo bumped up my account on searches.

Because it’s impossible to stop someone from following you on the platform, and there’s hardly any reason to unfollow someone, the simple longevity of my account might also explain why I have accreted a relatively large number of followers.

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A fourth possible explanation for my high follower-to-following ratio is the profile image I use:

I chose the Statue of Liberty because I was born in New York City and had been brushing up my French when I joined Duolingo.

I’ve noticed a fair number of my followers are engaged in learning English. The Statue of Liberty is a widely recognized, highly positive cultural icon. This is a bold, eye-catching photo.

Visitors to the city gravitate to the statue. My nephew Benny stood on Liberty Island last week during spring break. I stared at the statue on my first ride on the Staten Island Ferry two winters ago, climbed to the windows of her crown as a teenager, and was fascinated as a child whenever we rode Circle Line.

With a broken shackle and chain at her feet, she represents freedom from slavery. Walking forward, she embodies progress. Thanks to Emma Lazarus’ poem, she has become a symbol to welcome immigrants, especially the dispossessed.

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For these reasons, I suspect my profile image is the main reason others follow me on Duolingo. It is a small vote for the hope that the United States still values certain ideals and that, despite everything, this nation remains a steadfast beacon of liberty to the world.