hallettj

Interesting! I would not have guessed that “novella” predated “novel”. But it seems that the modern English meaning of “novella” being a story with a length in between a novel and a short story is pretty different from the older Latin and Italian meanings. I’m going to imagine there was another process where “novella” picked up that specific meaning.

It happens I watched The Decameron series on Netflix recently, which was entertaining. I’m sure it’s very different from the original book - probably only sharing the setting, and some character names.

Good points! This reminds me of a thought I had the other day: why do we use the word “novel” meaning “original, of a kind not seen before” to mean “a fictional written work on the order of hundreds of pages”? I’m sure there was a process behind that etymology. Someone could have made up a previously unused word, but novel words sound too silly to get people to repeat them. As an example consider the French Academy’s attempt to get people to say “courriel” because they didn’t like French speakers borrowing the English word “email”. Or probably more accurately: unless you’re speaking French in recent history, no one is in charge of words, and there is no plan.

You can graft a cutting of one tree species onto another, and both will grow normally. People do that to get trees with two different colors of flowers, or to grow multiple types of fruit on the same tree. Plants are weird.