![\"A](\"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/images\/blog\/nymphaea.jpg\")
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There was talk of ponds and water lilies last night at the French conversation group and I discovered that one French word for water lily is nymph\u00e9a<\/em> [n\u025b\u0303.fe.a], which comes from nymphaea<\/em> the Latin name for this genus of plants. The Latin word comes from the Ancient Greek word \u03bd\u03cd\u03bc\u03c6\u03b7<\/em> (nymphe), which means girl, and also refers to a low ranking female deity who haunts rivers, springs, forests and other places [source<\/a>]. <\/p>\n Nymph\u00e9a<\/em> refers specifially to the white water lily, or nymphaea alba<\/em>, which also known as the European White Waterlily, White Lotus, or Nenuphar, a name that is also found in French: n\u00e9nuphar<\/em> [ne.ny.fa\u0281], and which comes via the Persian \u0646\u064a\u0644\u0648\u0641\u0631 (ninufar) or the Arabic \u0646\u0644\u0648\u0641\u0631 (nilufar), from the Sanskrit \u0928\u0940\u0932\u094b\u0924\u092a\u0932 (n\u012blotpala – blue lotus), from \u0928\u0940\u0932 (n\u012bla – blue-black) and \u0909\u0924\u092a\u0932 (utpala – lotus) [source<\/a>].<\/p>\n Many names for plants in French come directly from Latin, whereas in English many plants have common names and Latin names. In other languages do plants have both common and Latin-derived names, or just one or the other?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There was talk of ponds and water lilies last night at the French conversation group and I discovered that one French word for water lily is nymph\u00e9a [n\u025b\u0303.fe.a], which comes from nymphaea the Latin name for this genus of plants. The Latin word comes from the Ancient Greek word \u03bd\u03cd\u03bc\u03c6\u03b7 (nymphe), which means girl, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86,104,107,111,118,10,53,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arabic","category-english","category-etymology","category-french","category-greek","category-language","category-sanskrit","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9071\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}