“Vermont is French for 'green mountain.' Montreal is 'royal mountain.' Montana is just 'mountain.' Half the map is the same Latin word wearing different hats.”
The Latin mons (genitive montis) meant 'mountain' or 'hill' and came from a Proto-Indo-European root *men- meaning 'to project, to jut out.' Romans used mons constantly in their geography — Mons Aventinus, Mons Capitolinus, Mons Vesuvius. The seven hills of Rome were all montes. The word was as fundamental to Roman space as 'street' is to ours.
Old French reshaped montis into montaigne by the 12th century, which Middle English borrowed as mountaine around 1200. Meanwhile, the simpler form mount entered English directly from Latin mons via Old French mont. English ended up with both: mount for proper names (Mount Everest, Mount Sinai) and mountain for the generic thing.
European colonizers spread the Latin root across the globe. Samuel de Champlain named Mont Réal ('royal mountain') in 1535 — though Jacques Cartier may have named it first. The Spanish named Montana. French settlers named Vermont (vert mont, 'green mountain'). Pierre-Simon Laplace used montagne in his geological writings. Every continent except Antarctica has major features named from this single Latin word.
The word mount also entered English in a completely different sense — 'to climb upon,' from Latin montare, 'to go up a mountain,' which generalized to mean ascending anything. To mount a horse, mount an attack, mount a picture on a wall — all from the act of going up a mountain. The Romans looked at a jutting piece of earth and gave us a word that now means every kind of rising.
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Mountains define borders, weather, culture, and mythology. They split languages — the Pyrenees divide Spanish from French. They split religions — the Himalayas separate Hindu from Buddhist traditions. They split economies. Nearly every major mountain range on earth is also a political boundary.
And the word for all of this is the same one Romans used for the hills they built a city on. Mons. The thing that juts out. That is all a mountain is, etymologically — earth that refused to stay flat.
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