Thank god for Alberto Balconi. His invention of the balcony provided a natural nesting ground for topless celebrities. He gave us almost as much enjoyment as the late, great Hendrik Yacht.
A full gallery can be found here
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OK, here are the real etymologies. (Caveat: all etymology is tentative.) Both of those words had made it into English by Shakespeare’s time, but I don’t think the Bard used either one. What we refer to as “the balcony scene” in Romeo and Juliet is introduced by ol’ Shakey as “JULIET appears above at a window.”
“Balcony” comes most directly from the Italian balcone, which meant platform or scaffold. According to the OED it was pronounced bal-KO-nee in English, in the Italian manner, until about 1825, when the stress shifted to the modern pronunciation. The origin is murky. A nearly identical form of the word exists in just about every European language, but it didn’t originate with the Romans because there is no comparable word in Latin. There are similar words in Persian (balkaneh) and in Old High German (balcho).
The origin of “yacht” is clear (I think). The word came from the old Dutch word “jaghtschip,” meaning “hunting ship.” The original jaght ships were light, fast craft used to hunt pirates. In modern Dutch, the jaght- has become jacht-. A hunting dog, for example, is a jachthond. The Dutch “j” is pretty much the same as the English consonantal “y,” so if you simply imagine the two letters transposed to arrive at “yachthond,” the correlation to “yacht” is evident.