Grave Stone

Yesterday I bought "The Fountain" on DVD--of course I was going to buy it the day it came out--and today I was watching the making-of features. Part of the movie is set in Central America, so they went to Guatemala on a research trip. The camera passed a sign which read

CEMENTERIO GENERAL

and I thought, "There is no way that 'cement' and 'cemetery' are related!" I had to stop the movie and look the two words up, and I am delighted to report that no, there's no connection between them: I'm guessing that the introduction of the "-n-" into "cemetery" in Spanish was a mere accident of history, certainly not of etymology.

"Cemetery" comes from the Greek word "koiman", "to put to sleep", plus the suffix "-terion", which indicates place: a cemetery is a place where we put the dead for their eternal rest. (This suffix is cognate to Latinate "-ary" and its off spring "-ery", so common in such English words as "library", a place with books in it, and "battery", in the military sense a place for beating down the foe--"batter" and "battle" are descended from French "battre", "to beat, to strike".)

"Cement", on the other hand, comes from Latin "caedere", "to cut". The does not on the surface of it make any sense, but it actually does: cement was originally made from the chips and pebbles left over from cutting larger pieces of stone. The word devolves into "cut-ment", with that suffix turning a verb into a noun denoting something as being a product of something else ("derangement", say, or "commandment").