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Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

Senatus Populus ... Que Romani! The senate and people of Rome.

Italy, per se, is a modern construct but the capital is still Rome and I think it fair to draw associations to the old empire.

I love seeing the SPQR logo and I think it is a really useful link to the past.

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Fun fact: The -gh endings of many English words share a proto–Indo European root with that enclitic¹ -que in Senatus Populusque Romani. I remember being skeptical of this when I first heard it assuming that the person was arguing for a shared Latin heritage until I dug in and discovered that it actually went back to PIE.²

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1. For the non-linguists here, an enclitic is a suffix added to a word that either functions as a separate word (here -que means “and”) or as a grammatical modifier like the possessive ’s in English.

2. Proto–Indo European for those of you who don’t do acronyms.

It seems this -que was already a relic at that time, or maybe sort of literary, because it coexisted with et (as in etc, et cetera, &c), which still exists e.g. in French. Or maybe one is from antic Latin and the other is from "vulgar"/late Latin ?

I think PolyMathy on YouTube went into this topic, and it is part of Greek.

It was probably this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5CUiP5oiH0

There were a number of different ways to write and in Latin. The Vulgate Bible, apparently unhappy with all the vav-connectives in its Hebrew sources uses them all.

This piqued my interest with the -gh endings, so I did a little investigation. What I found wasn't "many", apparently the only really attested example in Modern English is "through" and pretty much every other instance has died out. With a side note that the -kWe ending, also became "hw-" prefixes in English question words and possibly also the ge- prefix on collective nouns (also long since lost in English, but still present in German) which no survives only in the "i" in "handiwork", originally "hand geworc".

Of course, I only did a cursory examination, so there might be other examples not mentioned in the articles I found, but that's what I learned in about half an hour. Still, very cool fun fact, thanks!

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