Animals and nature

Among the landscape words is l’isola, the direct heir of Latin insula, with its s intact and audible. English has the stranger history. Its own word for the thing was Germanic — iegland, a compound of a lost word for water and the ordinary « land » — and it carried no s anywhere at all: for centuries it was written « iland ». But English had also borrowed « isle » from French, and « isle » really does go back to insula. Scribes who knew their Latin saw two words that looked alike, assumed a family, and wrote an s into « island » as well. The letter has stayed ever since and has never been pronounced. So the word that looks related is not, and the word that genuinely is related, « isle », is the one that lost the sound in speech. A third member of the family came in from Italian itself: « isolate » goes back, by way of French, to isolato, made into an island.