I've idly wondered for quite a while about the connections between certain words that sound very similar to me.
First of all, Iscariot is the surname of the Biblical Judas who betrayed Jesus. Izchierdo (or izchierda) is Spanish for "left" -- as in the direction. Iskierka is a very aggressive and self-centered dragon in Naomi Novik's Temeraire series.
I've known the name Iscariot since childhood, of course. Izkierka is a name that seemed oddly familiar to me when I ran across it in Novik's books -- about dragons in the Napoleonic wars -- but I couldn't pin it down then.
Finally, the association clicked for me after I resumed studying Spanish on DuoLingo. I speculated that all three words might come from a root word meaning "left" that might also mean malicious or sinister, according to the common old superstition that left-handedness meant something was wrong with somebody, perhaps cursed by the devil. Indeed, the word sinister comes from the Latin for left, or left hand, which also carried connotations of unluckiness and bad omens.
But I finally looked the words up, and it turns out that my speculations were just wrong.
Etymonline.com and other sources say that Iscariot comes from Greek Iskariotes, said to be from Hebrew ishq'riyoth "man of Kerioth" (a place in Palestine).
Wiktionary says that izquierdo is derived from the Basque word ezker (left), and ancestry.com says the word has pre-Roman origins and also mentions ezker. Houseofnames.com goes further and says
The word "izquierdo" is ultimately of Basque/Celtic origin deriving from a combination of the Basque word "escu" meaning "hand" and the Celtic "kerros" meaning "left."
Finally, I hadn't remembered Iskierka's origin clearly. It turns out that her name is explained in Black Powder War, the book where her egg hatches. As naominovik,fandom.com summarizes it,
The name she chose was "Iskierka", from a Polish folksong which a local girl had been singing nearby. (The literal translation of iskierka is "little spark", an affectionate diminutive. The song may have been Bajka iskierki ("Little Spark's Fairytale"), a popular Polish lullaby by Janina Porazińska.)
So there you have it. These three words sound quite similar to me, but they are apparently completely unrelated.
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A Twitch streamer whom I follow was GMing a science fiction game on Friday. The party encountered some beings in a marketplace who speak in a mechanical-mask voice that he said resembled what Leia sounded like in Return of the Jedi when she was disguised as a bounty hunter, saying something that sounded like "Yo toe, yo toe," and then he tweaked that a little, with his aliens using a greeting that sounds something like "Ya tey! Ya tey!"
Actually, I just went back and watched the clip from RotJ, and Bounty Hunter Leia sounds like she's saying Ya tey, ya tey, yo toe.
I've read a lot of Tony Hillerman mysteries, so the "Ya tey" phrase reminded me immediately of the Navajo / Dine Bizaad greeting , sometimes transliterated as "ya teeh" or "ya ta hey" but more formally as “Yá’át’ééh." Various sources say this literally means "it is good" or "it is well" rather than "hello."
Note, I wouldn't be all that surprised if George Lucas appropriated the greeting from the Navajo for RotJ, or maybe Lawrence Kasdan although I know far less about him. I just don't have time right now to go down a rabbithole of Star Wars research to find out.
I mentioned the Twitch thing to someone else who said (before I mentioned the Navajo word) that she was reminded of Hiro Nakamura's triumph phrase he says after the first time he teleports, in Heroes, which I had remembered as being close-captioned as "Ya tai! (I did it)" but which fan lore spells Yatta!
Guillermo Paz claims on seriesandtv.com:
Yatta (???) is a Japanese short form for “yarimashita”, which translates to “(I/We) did it!”, but can also have meanings of “okay!”, “it’s done!”, “ready!”, or “all right!”
The words in this example are a little closer in meaning than the Iscariot/izchierdo/Izkiera trio, but I seriously doubt there is any linguistic connection between the Navajo and Japanese words. However, that article says Yatta is a more modern Japanese usage, so I suppose it's faintly possible that it was taken from Navajo code talkers in World War II? If anyone knows anything about this at all, let me know!
Finally, I asked my phone's Google assistant verbally to translate what I pronounced as ya-tey. It detected Spanish and spelled it yate and said it meant "I already." I haven't run across that one yet in my irregular Duolingo study.
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Anyway, I was interested that those different clusters of similar-sounding words grabbed my attention during the same week. I'd be really interested to hear about any other clusters of words that sound similar but do NOT have anything to do with each other.
