For awhile now, i knew that the italian prefix con - meant WITH. As in "tonno con cipolla", which is one of Ashoke's favourite pizzas. However, knowing that con meant with is not the same as perceiving it to mean with.
That is to say, each time you hear CON---, you must feel that something is
with something else. For instance,
constellation - with stars. This means that when an italian reads this word, he would expect that something is with stars (in the chomskian sense, the word with requires an A and B who are in the "with" relation).
Whereas, whenever i read this word, it was an atomic whole with no other expectancy. In a sense, when one says "the constellation Leo ...", it is as if the word has really been misappropriated and changed its meaning.
So, an italian must have a different percept of such words compared to us - maybe each time he reads "con-stellation" (in english) without any other word (along
with stars), his expectation is frustrated ?
I am curious, does this really happen? Are there other words like this ?
This is vaguely reminiscent of the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To test this a little bit, one would require either asking an italian how he perceives words like
constellation, or one should find a word in English, which has its origin in one's own language.
Nouns are not very good in this matter though - because the meaning is usually imported wholesale from
the parent language - but it is rare to find a verb in English that is borrowed from some Indian langauge (in my case). Incidentally, it seems that verbs are rarely borrowed/imported ?
BTW,
conundrum 
- 1596, Oxford University slang for "pedant," also "whim," etc., later (1790) "riddle, puzzle," also spelled quonundrum; the sort of ponderous pseudo-Latin word that was once the height of humor in learned circles.
