molino
ES [moˈlino] · Spanish for “mill” · the same word as Czech mlýn
Molino de viento sat under a photograph of La Mancha in a textbook, and my head answered mlýn before I had finished the word. Czech mlýn is a mill, the building with the wheel and the sacks, and the two sound near enough that I assumed my ears were doing me a favour.
I was ready to file it as a rhyme and move on. Czech has mlít for grinding and mlynář for the miller, so the whole shape felt home-grown and old. Confidence like that is usually a warning sign.
Late Latin had molina, a mill, from mola, the millstone, off the verb molere, to grind. Spanish stayed close to home and made molino. The Czech word took the scenic route. The Latin word moved into West Germanic and surfaced as Old High German mulīn, and from there it passed into Slavic as the ancestor of mlýn. German Mühle and English mill are the same borrowing arriving by their own roads. The good part is that Czech never needed the loan. Its own verb mlít, to grind, comes down from the ancient root that gave Latin molere in the first place. The word went abroad through two language families and came back to stand beside a cousin it had left at home.