The sharpest divergence in this quartet is not between old and new but between two modes of knowing: 山 shows a mountain, while 'mountain,' 'montaña,' and 'monto' all name one through the Latin idea of something projecting upward. English and Spanish are genuinely sisters here — both trace their syllables back through Vulgar Latin *montanea, parting ways only in the final stretch of phonological drift, the nasal shaping itself differently under Norman and Iberian tongues. Zamenhof's 'monto' makes the kinship explicit by stripping the word to its Latin stem and capping it with a grammatical -o, a deliberate act of clarification rather than invention. Only the Chinese character declines etymology altogether: look at 山 and you see the outline of ridges on the horizon — no root to reconstruct, no argument to settle.
Spelling settled in late Middle English; earlier attested forms include 'montayne' and 'mountayne.' The word arrived via Anglo-French rather than directly from Latin, giving it one more syllable of erosion than its Spanish cousin.
Historically denoted a highland or forested region before narrowing to a single peak; 'La Montaña' still designates the hilly interior of Cantabria. The palatal -ñ- reflects Ibero-Romance evolution from the Latin cluster -ny-.
Three peaks rising from a shared base — the center tallest, two flanking strokes lower on either side. Oracle bone inscriptions from the Shang dynasty (c. 1250–1050 BCE) show essentially the same silhouette, already recognizable. Unlike most characters, 山 carries no semantic sub-components: it is the image, not a combination of images. It became Kangxi radical #46, parent to hundreds of terrain and geology characters, including 火山 (volcano, 'fire-mountain') and 冰山 (iceberg, 'ice-mountain').
One of the oldest unambiguous pictograms in the Chinese writing system. Appears productively in compound words: 山水 (landscape painting, lit. 'mountain-water'), 山脉 (mountain range, lit. 'mountain-pulse/vein'), 登山 (mountaineering, lit. 'ascend-mountain').
The stem is productive via Esperanto's regular morphology: montaro (mountain range, -ar- collective), monteto (hill, -et- diminutive), submonto (foothills, sub- under/below), malmonto (an ironic or poetic 'anti-mountain' — rare but grammatically valid).
Three peaks scratched into bone around 1250 BCE; three syllables borrowed from Latin and worn smooth by Norman French — the mountain was always there, patient, waiting for each people to find their own angle of approach.