Easy in Translation

1. As with French, the main word that means easy in Latin is facilis. We have the word as "facile," which is a word that is well-known but not often used except in its bureaurcratized uses "facility" and "facilitate," the terms appropriately nouned and verbed. (Ow. Ow. Ow.)

So I got curious. Where does English get its words for easiness from? After some brainstorming and an OED, this is what I've found.

• Easy is from the Old French verb aiser or aisier, to put at ease. This verb may well be from the late Latin asia/asium, but at that point the etymology is obscure. I know it was around in Middle English.
  
• Cinch is from Spanish (ooooh) cinga, and refers to the saddle-girth. Cinch soon came to mean colloquially a sure hold or a sure thing from the late 19th century onward. It's sure to happen, so it's a cinch, and it's easy.
• Evident, obvious are both from Latin. Ex + vident means "seeing out," while ob + via is "in the way." They're out there, and they're too easy to miss.
• Manageable, through Italian or Spanish, and perhaps back to the Latin manus, meaning hand. So if something is manageable, it can be handled. Manageable though is less easy than "easy," having a weaker sense of ease or desirability.
  
• Simple is from the Latin, basically the same word over again. It can mean easy, in a few different ways. Probably better to call someone easy-going than simple-going though.
• Basic is again from the Latin, and it denotes a foundation or (with -ic) a fundamental part. Probably means easy in reference to a student learning the basics of a subject first, which will inevitably be easier than what comes afterward. It's something that should be known, and is thus judged easy. If someone has to explain something by saying, "Well, basically," they're appealing to what should be easier to know. And so on.
• Trifle comes from the Old French, but it's unclear where before that, whether it is Latinate, Gothic, or what not. It's apparently similar to the word truffle, but I don't know how.
  

There are others. Too many of them come from Latin; I'll have to search for what the Anglo-Saxon equivalents were, because those don't seem to have survived, or have melded into the other forms.

What Anglo-Saxon turns up, from here: http://home.comcast.net/~modean52/oeme_dictionaries.htm

"easy [] 1. adj íeðelic; íeðe pleasant; léoht trifling; ~-going léohtmód; ~ to believe? léafléoht; 2. ~ly adv íeðelíce; 3. make ~ wv/t1b líhtan¹ relieve"

Iethelic, leoht... leoht is probably something that got transformed into light, in the sense of getting a little light (trifling) reading done. Light is a word that goes off into the Germanic tongues rather than anything Latinate.