Maridos in Marriage?

I recently purchased for my Kindle and re-read the Israeli linguistician, Guy Deutscher's, "Unfolding of Language". This book was a great source of inspiration for me. I never had the courage to break into linguistics until I had read his book. With my fascination with the etymology of words and the histories of languages in general, it was the perfect fit for me -- and explained in a very concise and clear manner so that even amateurs with little linguistic background could easily pick it up and understand it.

In a section on erosion, economy and expressiveness, he explains how languages have historically gone through cycles of words collapsing into single units to create new words derived from a need for economy and from habitual usage of words together. The erosive process must also work in the reverse, though: what destroys language must also build language. When our words collapse into a single unit, they have already lost their expressiveness. We are numb to the expressive force they once contained and simply accept them as the required components of our language to express our most basic ideas. We therefore beef up our words to create new ones, such, as he cites, with the English negation 'not'. Deutscher draws the example that the initial adverb of negation in English was the same as the French 'ne'. This gradually lost its expressive force, so English speakers built it up with -a-wiht (read: 'a bit'): ne-a-wiht. The forces of economy and erosion didn't lurk far behind: ne-a-wiht eroded to 'naht' (also spelled 'naught') and came to be written 'not'.

In his journey to prove this point, he stumbles upon the formation of nouns from verbs and draws on the English word 'marriage.' This was derived from Old English, 'mariage', which came from the French 'mariage', which in turn was derived from the stem of the verb 'marier' (to give in marriage, to marry), mari- and suffixing -age (equivalent to the English -hood, cf. Old English '-had' or 'had', "person" or "state"). If we trace this root further back, we find it derives from the adjectival 'maritus' (nuptial or matrimonial) turned noun pair 'maritus-marita' (husband-wife), itself derived from 'maritare' (to marry, to give in marriage).

Deutscher stops there, but in my reading, it hit me that this verb stem, mari-, looked awfully like a word I knew in another language: marido (husband) from the Spanish language. When I researched it, low and behold, it, too, derives from 'maritus'. I couldn't believe it was so obvious, and yet, I had never considered it!

By the way, when I researched this further in Proto-Indo-European dictionaries and with reliable sources, 'maritare' and 'maritus' appear to derive from an earlier 'mas, maris' (young man), which is speculated to have derived from the Proto-Indo-European *mari- or *mori-, which originally meant: 'young woman'! How quickly a word can change its appearance and meaning, leaving no traces behind unless we're lucky enough to have enough written records to recognize its past.