cair–paravel:Libreria Acqua Alta, Venice. Literally, ‘library of high water’, this bookshop floods d
cair–paravel:Libreria Acqua Alta, Venice. Literally, ‘library of high water’, this bookshop floods during Venice’s acqua alta, so the books are all kept safe in floating vessels, such as gondolas, boats and bathtubs. Language tidbit time!! Because I’m a nerd and too enthusiastic about romance languages, and bookshops make me happy. Libreria is actually a false cognate - in Italian, Spanish, and French! Librería in Spanish, and librairie in French, all three come from the Latin word for ‘book,’ liber. (Short 'i’ in there, lih-ber; the same word with a long 'i’, lee-ber, means free, as in 'liberty.’) But none of them, ironically, mean library. They all mean bookshop. The word in all three languages for a library as we know it descends from a word Latin copped (like so many other things) from the Greek. Bibliothēkē, “a collection of books,” became bibliotheca in Latin, then biblioteca in Italian and Spanish and bibliotheque in French. So, next time you go to your local library, you can laugh for a moment about how fitting it is that “free books” is encompassed into one word. Meanwhile, I want to be off to Venice… To that lovely Highwater Bookshop. -- source link