Italian: aceto=vinegar. Spanish: aciete=oil. Bwuh?

Factual Questions
1

This might be a stupidly simple question, but I can’t find any good resources for delving into foreign-language etymologies in English…

In Italian, Aceto is vinegar. In English, Acetic acid is the significant component of vinegar - indeed it seems to be the case that the word acid itself derives from the same root.

So what’s going on with Spanish, where aciete means oil? From what root comes this word? Is this a false cognate, or did something weird happen with swapped labels somewhere along the line?

2

Wiki says it’s from Arabic, for “grease” or “lubricate.” So, no, no common root, despite the apparent similarity.

3

It’s a false cognate. Italian aceto comes from the Latin acetum, which means “vinegar”.

Spanish aciete comes from the Arabic zeyt, which means oil/lubrication.

4

Wiki also says that it’s «aceite», not «aciete».

(Yeah, I’m being pretentious, in a half-remembered high school way…)

5

Correct. acEIte.

In parallel to that, olives can be called either “olivas”, or *“aceitunas” *, both in the end from “what you get oil from”.

Meanwhile, in Spanish vinegar is “vinagre”; the root of which means “soured wine”

6

Chemistry wise, acet- (ic,-yl,-ate) is a prefix indicating a methyl group (CH[sub]3[/sub] attached to a carbonyl (C=O). It has nothing to do with acids except that organic acids are a type of carbonyl. It makes sense then that acetic would be derived from a word for oil since methyl groups are oily.

The other prefixes have some interesting derivations but butane is the only one I remember off the top of my head. Butane is derived from butter because butyric acid is a decomposition product of butter. At least thats what I was taught.

7

No.

Acetic isn’t derived from a word meaning oil. That’s the whole point - they’ve different roots. Acetic is from the Latin acetum meaning vinegar, but the Spanish word is from the Arabic zeyt meaning oil.