What is the Root of word veterinarian?

Answer 1

About 4,000 years ago a group of tribes from southern Russia expanded into Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and Northern India, taking their language with them. The branch which settled in India called itself arya (Sanskrit for "noble" or "hospitable"), a name which is related to Iran. For a while, the word Aryan was used to describe this language-group but after Hitler and the Nazis distorted its meaning, linguists settled upon the term Indo-European. In reconstructing the prehistoric Indo-European language, linguists have deduced that its word for "year" was *wet-. This root word gave Latin vetus meaning "old" (i.e. "yeared", compare seasoned) and from vetus we get veteran. Literally meaning "old man", veteran has always implied "old soldier" and thus, in the U.S., it has acquired the additional meaning of "ex-serviceman". In a way, therefore, the expression a seasoned veteran is redundant: to become a veteran one must have lasted at least four seasons. Anything which is inveterate has lasted many years; it comes from the Latin inveterare, "to become, or to make, old". For reasons we cannot fathom, inveterate never seems to qualify anything pleasant. We might hear of an inveterate liar, inveterate thief or an inveterate scoundrel but never of an inveterate philanthropist. Latin made further use of *wet- in veterina, one of its words for "cattle". In this case, the vet- may have implied either "elderly" (many years) or, more probably, "fully grown" (more than one year). Veterina gave us veterinarian, veterinary and the verb to vet, meaning "to examine carefully and critically". We now hear of people being vetted before being allowed access to sensitive or confidential material but, originally, vettingreferred to horses being examined by a veterinarian before a race.