What things you discovered on your own, that is actually already known and named for a long time? For example, you observe a phenomenon, you write it down, but didn’t look it up further for lack of words. Years later, you chance upon the exact same thing on Wikipedia.
This is REALLY silly but that would be me making the absolutely unsurprising connection (to academics) between Russian and Sanskrit because I was trying to learn basic Russian and learning their word for man is basically distant cousins along the language tree to the Malay “manusia”.
Anyway out of that I learned that the etymology of punch comes from the Slavic languages’ word for five (because five fingers = a whole dang fist) which is of course related to Sanskrit as well and survives in Malay in words like “pancaindera”
Sekian terima kasih.
Germanic, Greek, Latin, Romance, Slavic, Indic; all these languages ultimately are descendants of an ancestral language linguists call the Proto-Indo-European.
english goose == German gans == sanskrit gansa == malay angsa
Yup!! For some reason I never situated Russian and Ukrainian in the family tree lmao