Room, stay and extras

Travelling is on the earlier list; this is what is said at the desk. One word here is older than either language and arrived in both. Les arrhes — silent h, plural only, never une arrhe — is the deposit that reserves a room. It comes from Latin arra, shortened from arrabo, which Latin had from Greek arrhabṓn, which Greek had from a Semitic word for a pledge given in advance. English has the same word and does not look it: the « earnest » of « earnest money », still used in a property contract, is Middle English ernes, from old French erres, the ancestor of arrhes — and it was later reshaped to match the unrelated adjective « earnest », serious, which comes from a completely different root. So two spellings that share nothing on the page are the same pledge, and both of them are still handed over before a key is.