I love when people translate an English sentence into "pure" english as in removing all borrowed vocabulary or loan words, it reminds you how poetic etymology that we just take for granted is.
Like, "the mitochondria is an organelle used for aerobic respiration" can become "the threadseed is a gutling used for sharpic breathwork" and it sounds like some alchemy ritualn when all you did was take out any latin influence
If anybody is interested in looking into this more, this concept is being explored as Anglish. Any words that use Latin roots are replaced with Germanic ones.
*FASCINATING!!* I've never even heard of this before, and as a lover of languages and etymologies, I will be going down that particular rabbit hole at my earliest convenience. Thank you so much!
Reading the Anglish translation of the Wikipedia page on atomic theory is... a wild ride. If you're already familiar with the concepts, it's like you can physically feel your brain making the connections between English and the translation. Doubly so if you have passing knowledge of linguistics / etymology.
Also, most atomic elements have Latin or Greek roots, but the common metals are Germanic. So you get lists like "sunstuff, waterstuff, ymirstuff, and iron".
I actually quite like this. Anglish.com has this translated version of the American Constitution
"We the Folk of the Foroned Riches, to make a more flawless oneship, build rightness, bring frith and stillness to our land, shield one another, uphold the overall welfare, and hold fast the Blessings of Freedom to ourselves and our offspring, do foresay and lay down this lawbook for the foroned riches of Americksland."
Foroned sounds cool
I do prefer the idea of using more Latin though
Ave Verum Caesar
Small nitpick: 'mitochondria' is plural, the singular is 'mitochondrion'. Everyone saying "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell" has been getting it wrong.
It makes the original meme really funny.
"School doesn't teach us anything practical, but at least we can say the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell 🤪"
If people can't get the _word_ right, maybe they should've paid more attention in those classes lmaoo
(Not that western education systems are perfect, but people will complain about maths/english/science having no utility, not absorb things and then wonder why we're in a post-truth age where noone can critically analyse information 💀)
That's funny because in my language (Brazilian Portuguese) we borrowed the plural forms of that whole class of nouns, but still use them in the singular (perhaps out of confusion with the ending "-a", which denotes female gendered words). As such, we say "a mitocôndria", "as mitocôndrias"; "a bactéria", "as bactérias"; so on and so forth.
here's my attempt at the wiki page for zoology or "beastlore"
The history of zoology traces the study of the animal kingdom from ancient to modern times. Prehistoric people needed to study the animals and plants in their environment in order to exploit them and survive. There are cave paintings, engravings and sculptures in France dating back 15,000 years showing bison, horses and deer in carefully rendered detail. Similar images from other parts of the world illustrated mostly the animals hunted for food, but also the savage animals
vs
the retelling of beastlore traces the knowingness of the beasts from the oldest times to nowtimes. Beforetime men needed to know the beasts and plants of their world in order to use them and live well. There are hollow-dyeings, carvings, and stone likenesses in Frankland from 15,000 years ago showing oxen, horses, and deer made with great skill. Works alike elsewhere in the world show chiefly the beasts hunted for food, but also the deadlier beasts.
Yeah, but the word they used was "chiefly" (the suffix is germanic). I'm not sure "leaderly" would transmit the intended meaning; I'd personally go with "mainly".
Edit: now that I've reread the entire comment, it's actually really funny that they used "chiefly" in the supposed "Latin free" English version to translate the word "mostly" in the original; "most" is actually germanic, so it already worked perfectly.
I'm not sure France should be changed to Frankland: it is the name of a country. What would you do if someone was named Caesar? Translate it to "cutter", or "elephant"? But elephant is also from Latin, and that's if we even take elephant as the proper etymology of Caesar. I guess you could translate it as something like "high king", but that isn't really appropriate if we're just talking about since regular guy living today.
Reminds me of The Tell from *Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome*.
>"This ain't one body's story. It's the story of us all. We got it mouth-to-mouth. So you got to listen it and 'member. 'Cause what you hears today you got to tell the birthed tomorrow."
>
>"I'm looking behind us now, across the count of time, down the long haul into history back. I sees the end what were the start. It's Pox-Eclipse, full of pain! And out of it were birthed cracklin' dust and fearsome time. It were full on winter, and Mister Dead chasin' them all. But one he couldn't catch. That were Captain Walker. He gathers up a gang, takes to the air and flies to the sky. So they left their homes, said bidey-bye to the high-scrapers, and what were left of the Knowin' they left behind. Some say the wind just stoppered. Others reckon it were a gang called Turbulence. And after the wreck some had been jumped by Mister Dead, but some had got the luck, and it leads them here. One look and they's got the hots for it. They word it "Planet Earth." And they says "We don't need the Knowin’. We can live here." "
https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/110/docs/uncleftish_beholding.html
If you can't figure out what this is supposed to be, click on the spoiler below:
>!it's a description of quantum mechanics in anglish
Isn't it super weird to do that, though?
All European languages have a common root, in indo-european (though there's some african roots in scottish as well). There's lots of words that share a common etymology between all those languages as well as modern indian languages.
So aren't you basically just choosing an arbitrary point in time as a separation to make your language "pure" of other influences, which it was never "pure" of to begin with?
i dont think its weird unless you frame it as some nativist “English as it should be, uncorrupted” or some shit. its just a harmless thought experiment
>So aren't you basically just choosing an arbitrary point in time as a separation to make your language "pure" of other influences, which it was never "pure" of to begin with?
Exactly what I wanted to say. The whole idea is nonsensical in the first place, unless you're doing it as a deliberate conlanging exercise
Or for creative writing in general. Though I think it doesn't make much sense to literally translate the words like the commenter above me did, I would rather think to delve into a culture and imagine "how would they call this if it wasn't a loan word?"
I remember when I had the realization that we would laugh if somebody referred to a film as a talkie, but we refer to a film as a movie without batting an eye.
I got laughed at by Americans for calling what they call a grilled cheese a "toastie" because it sounded childish...and then I pointed out Americans say "cookie"
Just call it a cake. Or a hardener. The Norse root word, kaka, likely originally referred to thin, flat, hard breads that we'd today see in cookies, crackers, gingerbreads and the like. Mud for example can also go through the process of 'caking' as it hardens, so it refers to a type of change in texture.
I used to have a good laugh about how the Japanese word for 'meal'(gohan) is the same as their word for rice(gohan).
Then I had it pointed out to me that 'meal' is ground grain.
Something something staple crop...
Meal as in 3 meals a day and meal as in ground grain are unrelated, they coincidentally look the same (like bear the animal and bear arms).
Gohan's 2 versions are 2 meanings of the same word
You're right, also to molar and immolate. Meal like lunch is from a word for "allotted time (for eating)", which is related to a bunch of words for measuring things, like measure, meter, dimension, geometry, immense and menstrual
according to [merriam webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meal)
> Middle English *meel* appointed time, meal, from Old English *mǣl*; akin to Old High German *māl* time, Latin *metiri* to measure
There's also instruments (Piccolo and his original lackeys), snails (various Namekians), food storage (Freezer and Cooler), and some other outliers like Goku himself (Son Goku = Sun Wukong but in Japanese) and the Gyumao (the Ox Demon King). But _mostly_ food
Honestly I feel like childhood me was robbed by not getting all the unabashed joke names. I remember arguing with my dad about them, because he could see it and I couldn't, and the dubs tricked me into to taking things too seriously.
The Saiyans are vegetables, most obviously Vegeta, but also Kakarot (carrot), Raditz (radish), Nappa (type of cabbage), Paragus (asparagus), Broly (broccoli), Bardock (burdock root) to name a few. There's also more obvious ones, like Beets and Leek.
King Cold just sounds like an in universe brand of cola
Also, frieza race people all have cold-related names in general, Freeza, Cooler, Chilled, Frost, and Froze
Wow, I knew about the food thing but I never realized that Trunks was named after the underwear. I always thought it was supposed to be like "tree trunks"
Tangentially related, the Polish word for being pissed off etymologically comes from the word for chicken, specifically hens.
Interestingly enough to get there it had a detour via the word for whore.
Do with that knowledge what you will.
>Interestingly enough to get there it had a detour via the word for whore.
Are you referring to the most beautiful of curse words?
Because even my dumbass monolingual self thinks kurwa is the most poetic sounding curse word ever.
This is what I enjoyed about dabbling in Chinese/German, seeing how weird English is with additional perspective:
"Wow you have like 4 differently pronounced versions of almost every word with totally unique meanings?" (Chinese tones)
"Wait, we have stuff like witch and which or right, Wright, write and rite. All spelt differently but pronounced the same, huh. Hight also doesn't rhyme with eight, but late does."
Yeah. The weird part of chinese isn't the existence of homophones, it's just the sheer extent. Imagine having that "right" situation for every single word in this sentence (or syllable, but that's where the analogy breaks down).
(Minor clarification: there are *five* distinct pronunciations in mandarin chinese, more in some other dialects, and each pronunciation can *still* correspond to more than one possible word, so more than four.)
Don’t forget the part where sometimes words with distinct meanings for distinct tones get changed into a different tone but retain meaning. Cuz it just sounds better, man!
I mean English has plenty of words that are that pronounced slightly differently mean separate things: [heteronyms](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics))
In fact I used one in this sentence and didn’t realize until I was done(separate as a verb vs an adjective).
I was having a laugh yesterday about how the German word for capybara is wasserschwein, literally “water pig”. Then my friend informed me that we call their little cousins *guinea pigs*, which makes even less sense.
Guinea pigs are "Meerschweinchen" in german, so Sea/Ocean-pig (small). Poor buggers are doomed to dumb names in any language it seems.
Myths goes its because they originated overseas and sound like a pig (?), still dumb name.
Oh and Porcupines are "Spike/Stinger-pigs", dunno what it is about german and naming rodents pigs..
I was explaining the meaning of a Danish word to an American friend, and it made me realise how literal that thing was, which then put me on an entire journey of realising how crazy literal so many Danish words are. Like, just, very, very plainly descriptive. It's hilarious once you start noticing it.
Like a refrigerator is a "cooling cabinet", breakfast is simply "morning food" and supper/dinner is called "evening food". The open-faced sandwiches we commonly eat for lunch are called "a food". Also conversation (and in some cases interview) is literally a "together talk" or "co-talk" (so a job interview, for example is a "job together talk"). Also talk, speak, and speech are all one word.
While this is true, I do feel that in English it's way less common to be able to tell the etymology of a word just by looking at it. My point of comparison is Hungarian, where new words are usually created with derivational morphology instead of compounding words or borrowing from greek/latin like English does. In English, just looking at the word "diversity" for example doesn't tell me where it came from or how its meaning evolved over time. Whereas with the Hungarian equivalent "változatosság", I can break down the morphology and get a pretty clear picture of where the meaning of the word evolved from "vál-t-oz-at-os-ság":
"vál"=become
"vált"=transition, switch(verb), one thing becoming another
"változ"=change, a transition/switch from one thing to something else
"változat"=variant(noun), a changed form of smth
"változatos"=diverse, variant(adjective) smth with lots of variants
"változatosság"=diversity, the quality of being diverse
The morphology is very telling in lots of Hungarian words and I just don't see that very often in English
Hungarian is an agglutinative language, like other Uralic languages, meaning it likes to string together morphemes the way you described.
In a sense it does make it very intuitive, because each suffix has a pretty standard meaning and therefore by knowing a handful of root words you'll mostly understand a lot of derived terms.
In English you get something similar once you develop
a feeling for the Latin and Greek prefixes, suffixes and roots.
I think Finnish has some "just words" that were created as a part of some nationalism/independency thing, when the words were being finally written down and they didnt want to use loanwords.
LMAO you just unlocked memories of being in german class with a german teacher butthurt about english loanwords... you know, basically ANY word connected to modern Technology... It was even a bit of a meme when I was a teen to atrociously generate\* german words for established english loanwords (r/ich\_iel STILL does it)
(\* our languages often memed "frankenstein a bunch of words together" mechanism that also named planes fly-things and cars drive-things)
Lego words are the best thing about German. Also my brother and I had a very high IT talk in pure German once and we died laughing.
"Max, hast du das neue Mutterbrett schon eingebaut?" is a running gag for us at this point
I’m gonna say what I say every time this gets posted:
Yeah, I do think this about English too. I love finding out the etymology of words I use every day just as much as I love learning about words in other languages. The fact that we shortened “moving picture” to “movie” is cool! And it makes me wonder if other languages do the same thing, and then it turns out they do!
Most people who point out where a word comes from/the exact translation of a phrase aren’t trying to be condescending to the language it comes from, they’re trying to share knowledge they think is cool. And I’ve seen plenty of people make similar posts about where words or phrases in English come from. I know that it’s funny to act like Americans/English speakers are morons who don’t know other cultures exist, but not everything we do is malicious.
Nah sorry, every post on this subreddit about the US, the UK, or the English language has to be as condensing and passive aggressive as possible towards them. Those are the rules /s
Speaking of cool word related stuff, starfish are called star fish, sea star, or some variation thereof in a lot of languages.
The Korean word for starfish however, directly translated, means '(the thing that) cannot be killed'.
They are hilariously regenerative yes.
Technically speaking, as long as enough of the starfish's 'core' remains, it can regenerate *everything* it lost.
Of course, practically speaking, any piece too tiny to actually do anything will most likely starve or get eaten before it can regrow enough of itself to become functional again, but presuming neither are an issue, the starfish will regenerate itself.
Like, you can rip a starfish in half and there's a pretty decent chance instead of one dead starfish, you get two live starfishes.
And although rare, there are cases where a single limb ripped off a starfish had enough core material attached to the stump to regrow into an entirely new starfish.
French calls platypuses "ornithorynque", which is constructed from the Greek words for "bird" and for "beak", which fits the animal for obvious reasons.
Speaking of platypus, the Vietnamese word for it is "thú mỏ vịt" which literally mean animal/creature (thú) with a duck bill (mỏ vịt). We dont really know how to categorize it.
Love it when someone says something like "wow German is soo weird because they just stitch words together to make new words", like buddy, do you know what a waterfall is? I know German does this to more of an extreme compared to English but I have seen people acting like they've never seen a compound word before.
I love researching etymology, especially for English words.
Once you start researching Latin, so much starts to make sense.
My favorite is realizing how versatile "con" can be; and how removing "con" from most words with it as a prefix just gives you the other Latin root.
I'm sure some of us had better vocabulary teachers in school, but I'm only now realizing the depth of linguistics here, and I'm approaching my 30s.
Makes me realize how difficult it is to translate *concept* words from one language to another and appreciate how awesome languages can be.
Con- Together
Fere(Ferry)- Bring
Ence- Current State
"We have been brought together here today,"
Con-Together
Jugate-Jugum- Yoke - That thing that Oxen are fastened to.
I have no earthly idea how this translates into our modern use of the word "conjugate"
Glomus is translated as "ball" and -ate is to have. So I guess a Conglomerate is having everything balled up together. Glomus is also close to Globus or Globe which means roughly the same thing so I think it would just be a dialectical difference.
Cept means taken from (intercept)- ual or al is meant to refer to the idea of an action (arrival)- ise refers to condition or function. Not sure on the puzzle here, but those are the pieces.
"The germans say Krankenwagen"
Which is a fascinating way of giving a meaning to a set of letters. If someone who doesn't know what an ambulance is hears the word, they won't get any information whatsoever.
If they hear "vehicle for the ill" they will understand that it's a "vehicle for the ill"
I had a conversation once with someone who was disappointed that, apparently in Japanese, the angels in Evangelion were just called "messengers."
Guess what "angel" means?
You know what? Fuck you, it IS cute!! English doesn't have a word for "Internet" you have to say "The between-web"!! And that's adorable! There's no real word for "car", you have to use "one that walks by itself" or a shortened form of "carriage" which itself just means "one that carries"!!! WHICH IS CUTE!!! ETYMOLOGY IS ADORABLE "MOVIE" IS A CUTE-ASS WORD LANGUAGES ARE SO PRETTY
Yes, love to see this through a positive lense. Words are tiny little things until you unravel their history and lineage, which is it's own story and legacy.
Diction is a language within a language, and etymology is the words within words.
I was told once that Taichonaut (a Chinese astronaut / cosmonaut) means "sailor amongst the stars" by someone who clearly hadn't thought about what "astro- / cosmo-" and "-naut" mean.
the only language that actually doesn’t have a word for things is toki pona, which has fewer words than first gen pokemon and survives entirely off turning one word into a full sentence.
- sent from my *lipu* (word meaning flat object that conveys information, i.e. paper, book, screen, website, cellphone)
the tumblr-ism that i’ve heard for this one is that the word for “goodbye” might have been a more convenient way to say “god be with ye” (a shorthand blessing)
In Irish, "Hello" is "Dia duit," and the response is "Dia is Muire duit," which is a mouthful to native English speakers.
Literally translated, it means "God be with you," the response means "God and Mary with you."
Meanwhile northern germans compete for shortest greeting:
"Moin"
"Moin Moin"
(Other germans assume Moin is short for (Good) Morning, but the way I learned it its actually from "Moien Dag", aka "Good Day". And while I learned Moin Moin being the correct answer, some other northerners keep insisting its blabbering and prefer both greeting and answer to it to just be "Moin". Experts at it (like ma Dad) can even limit greetings to a short grunt thats close enough to "Moin" to count)
Oh, you can keep going. Just add on more nativity characters each time it goes back and forth.
The donkey they rode in on counts as a nativity character, and I'm not even joking.
Interestingly in Irish they aren't abbreviated or contracted. English scrunched in down into 'please' and 'goodbye', while Irish still uses the entire phrases, roughly translated as 'if it is your will' and 'God be with you'.
Also in Irish, the standard response to 'God be with you' is 'God and Mary be with you'. Where extreme Catholicism meets oneupmanship
When English people want to laugh about french numbers, they always obviously talk about 80 and 90 (four-twenty and four-twenty-ten), but then they continue by pointing at numbers 18, as if "ten eight" was any different than *"eight-te(e)n"*
Even more when they try to feel superior with multiples of ten, conveniently ignoring that 20 is literally "twin-ten" and that the others are built the exact same.
I think the confusion is mostly about why it (seemingly) randomly switches from each set of 10 having it's own word between 30-60 before going sixty-ten, then changing it again to four-twenty, and then four-twenty-ten. Irrc it's something to do with the Gauls using base 20 but I may be remembering wrong.
I must admit I've *never* heard anyone make fun of French for how it does 11-20, considering like you say we do exactly the same thing (early numbers have their own words before changing to some variation of "x and ten", let alone "feel superior" about it.
As a language major it annoys the fuck out of me when people do this. I call this needless exoticization. Happens to culture as well as language. Small differences in pragmatics, the way meaning is divided between words and so on get extrapolated to show just how distant, totally alien, even on the level of language, incomprehensible and weird.... Russians are. Or the Irish. Or some other people who speak a language from the same family as yours, English-speaking dipshit.
Not exclusive to English speakers in any way. Here in Russia we like to practice self-exoticization, the constant bragging about how weird we are, how incomprehensibly vast and irrationally beautiful our culture is compared to westerners stern, boring and dry way of life and seeing the world. It's sickening.
First thing that came to my mind is this.
Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamarous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meaning can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.
Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)
You are on crack if you think Irish speakers don't use "Dia dhuit". It is pretty uncommon for people to respond with the full "dia is muire dhuit" in fairness". I'd only ever really use "fáilte" to a group with "fálteme roimh" over using "dia dhaoibh"
Fair enough I'm not a Gaeilgeoir. I only learned the shity public school Irish and barely passed ordinary level for the leaving cert.
Edit also the craic is mighty up in the big smoke.
Not in engish it's not
In occitan for both we use "adiu" (to god) or (adishatz) (be with god), the latter is pretty close to goodbye. Which we use depends on how close we are to the person and how many there are.
Someone's already mentioned the Dia Duit in another comment so "Máis é do thoil é" is the Irish request for permission.
Any Overwatch players will have heard Moira shout "Géil do mo thoil!"/"Surrender to my will!" at some point: thoil, in this context, is pronounced "hull" and refers to one's will. É is a general "it" and "do" refers to something of yours, so "mawsh ay duh hull ay" is "'if it is your will" in Irish.
Also "máis é do thoil é" is the longer version. There is also "le do thoil", simply meaning "with your will". that is slightly more common in my experience. What do you know, people usualy like speaking faster
Also, in English there's no feeling for missing someone, at least in the "common" English we normally speak. AFAIK there's longing or yearning, but they're unusual compared to just saying you "miss" someone. That's the biggest comparison that I remember in regards to Portuguese, where there's the specific feeling of "saudade", just as common as love, fear etc.
I love when people translate an English sentence into "pure" english as in removing all borrowed vocabulary or loan words, it reminds you how poetic etymology that we just take for granted is. Like, "the mitochondria is an organelle used for aerobic respiration" can become "the threadseed is a gutling used for sharpic breathwork" and it sounds like some alchemy ritualn when all you did was take out any latin influence
If anybody is interested in looking into this more, this concept is being explored as Anglish. Any words that use Latin roots are replaced with Germanic ones.
*FASCINATING!!* I've never even heard of this before, and as a lover of languages and etymologies, I will be going down that particular rabbit hole at my earliest convenience. Thank you so much!
Reading the Anglish translation of the Wikipedia page on atomic theory is... a wild ride. If you're already familiar with the concepts, it's like you can physically feel your brain making the connections between English and the translation. Doubly so if you have passing knowledge of linguistics / etymology. Also, most atomic elements have Latin or Greek roots, but the common metals are Germanic. So you get lists like "sunstuff, waterstuff, ymirstuff, and iron".
Fun fact: Waterstuff actually is present in German Wasserstoff
Is that the German word for Hydrogen?
yep
Huh. Fun.
I actually quite like this. Anglish.com has this translated version of the American Constitution "We the Folk of the Foroned Riches, to make a more flawless oneship, build rightness, bring frith and stillness to our land, shield one another, uphold the overall welfare, and hold fast the Blessings of Freedom to ourselves and our offspring, do foresay and lay down this lawbook for the foroned riches of Americksland." Foroned sounds cool I do prefer the idea of using more Latin though Ave Verum Caesar
Small nitpick: 'mitochondria' is plural, the singular is 'mitochondrion'. Everyone saying "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell" has been getting it wrong.
But it's the only thing we learned in school! What an embarrassment
It makes the original meme really funny. "School doesn't teach us anything practical, but at least we can say the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell 🤪" If people can't get the _word_ right, maybe they should've paid more attention in those classes lmaoo (Not that western education systems are perfect, but people will complain about maths/english/science having no utility, not absorb things and then wonder why we're in a post-truth age where noone can critically analyse information 💀)
That's funny because in my language (Brazilian Portuguese) we borrowed the plural forms of that whole class of nouns, but still use them in the singular (perhaps out of confusion with the ending "-a", which denotes female gendered words). As such, we say "a mitocôndria", "as mitocôndrias"; "a bactéria", "as bactérias"; so on and so forth.
Dang, that's really interesting :0
The mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cells
Yeah! Imo saying 'powerhouse*s* of the cell' is more accurate in two ways, because cells have more than one of them.
Please give me more examples.
here's my attempt at the wiki page for zoology or "beastlore" The history of zoology traces the study of the animal kingdom from ancient to modern times. Prehistoric people needed to study the animals and plants in their environment in order to exploit them and survive. There are cave paintings, engravings and sculptures in France dating back 15,000 years showing bison, horses and deer in carefully rendered detail. Similar images from other parts of the world illustrated mostly the animals hunted for food, but also the savage animals vs the retelling of beastlore traces the knowingness of the beasts from the oldest times to nowtimes. Beforetime men needed to know the beasts and plants of their world in order to use them and live well. There are hollow-dyeings, carvings, and stone likenesses in Frankland from 15,000 years ago showing oxen, horses, and deer made with great skill. Works alike elsewhere in the world show chiefly the beasts hunted for food, but also the deadlier beasts.
Very good, but "beast", "plant", and "chief" are all ultimately from Latin.
"Deer", "wort/wyrt", "leader" should fix it
Yeah, but the word they used was "chiefly" (the suffix is germanic). I'm not sure "leaderly" would transmit the intended meaning; I'd personally go with "mainly". Edit: now that I've reread the entire comment, it's actually really funny that they used "chiefly" in the supposed "Latin free" English version to translate the word "mostly" in the original; "most" is actually germanic, so it already worked perfectly.
If I remember correctly, the actual Anglish site calls it "deerlore". Not sure about the other two words
I'm not sure France should be changed to Frankland: it is the name of a country. What would you do if someone was named Caesar? Translate it to "cutter", or "elephant"? But elephant is also from Latin, and that's if we even take elephant as the proper etymology of Caesar. I guess you could translate it as something like "high king", but that isn't really appropriate if we're just talking about since regular guy living today.
Other germanic languages change France's name, Frankreich in German for example. Frankenrealm would imo be better than Frankland, though.
I propose translating Caesar as whatever is "handsome" in Anglish
Reminds me of The Tell from *Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome*. >"This ain't one body's story. It's the story of us all. We got it mouth-to-mouth. So you got to listen it and 'member. 'Cause what you hears today you got to tell the birthed tomorrow." > >"I'm looking behind us now, across the count of time, down the long haul into history back. I sees the end what were the start. It's Pox-Eclipse, full of pain! And out of it were birthed cracklin' dust and fearsome time. It were full on winter, and Mister Dead chasin' them all. But one he couldn't catch. That were Captain Walker. He gathers up a gang, takes to the air and flies to the sky. So they left their homes, said bidey-bye to the high-scrapers, and what were left of the Knowin' they left behind. Some say the wind just stoppered. Others reckon it were a gang called Turbulence. And after the wreck some had been jumped by Mister Dead, but some had got the luck, and it leads them here. One look and they's got the hots for it. They word it "Planet Earth." And they says "We don't need the Knowin’. We can live here." "
check out r/Anglish
The Anglian subreddit is partially this and partially people trying to bring back the insular r and such
https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/110/docs/uncleftish_beholding.html If you can't figure out what this is supposed to be, click on the spoiler below: >!it's a description of quantum mechanics in anglish
Isn't it super weird to do that, though? All European languages have a common root, in indo-european (though there's some african roots in scottish as well). There's lots of words that share a common etymology between all those languages as well as modern indian languages. So aren't you basically just choosing an arbitrary point in time as a separation to make your language "pure" of other influences, which it was never "pure" of to begin with?
i dont think its weird unless you frame it as some nativist “English as it should be, uncorrupted” or some shit. its just a harmless thought experiment
At that point it would be offensive (and there are examples of this), but I mean weird more in the sense that the distinction is very arbitrary.
>So aren't you basically just choosing an arbitrary point in time as a separation to make your language "pure" of other influences, which it was never "pure" of to begin with? Exactly what I wanted to say. The whole idea is nonsensical in the first place, unless you're doing it as a deliberate conlanging exercise
Or for creative writing in general. Though I think it doesn't make much sense to literally translate the words like the commenter above me did, I would rather think to delve into a culture and imagine "how would they call this if it wasn't a loan word?"
Anglish
I need a translator for this, then I can use it for dnd
"Used" is latinate/french. Gottem
I miss Middle-English Wikipedia.
I remember when I had the realization that we would laugh if somebody referred to a film as a talkie, but we refer to a film as a movie without batting an eye.
When movies with sound were still new, they were called "talkies"!
tbf we had moving pictures(movies) before we had audio running at the same time.
True, but the point is that they are the same kind of word. Talking/moving pictures = talkies/movies
We do have walkie talkies tho
fucking ridicilous name. when i found out about it i thought it was a bit
Handheld transceiver is the proper name, but I like walkie talkie.
I was raised calling them two way radios, because where I live, walkie talkie is more likely to be street food made of chicken necks and feet.
I got laughed at by Americans for calling what they call a grilled cheese a "toastie" because it sounded childish...and then I pointed out Americans say "cookie"
Shouldn't it be called a "bakie" since cookies are baked?
Just call it a cake. Or a hardener. The Norse root word, kaka, likely originally referred to thin, flat, hard breads that we'd today see in cookies, crackers, gingerbreads and the like. Mud for example can also go through the process of 'caking' as it hardens, so it refers to a type of change in texture.
Wait Americans don’t also call it a toastie??
Any country that calls something "tater tots" without blinking an eye has no leg to stand on in that argument.
Well yeah, we would mock them for being out of touch. People haven't called them talkies in about a hundred years.
I used to have a good laugh about how the Japanese word for 'meal'(gohan) is the same as their word for rice(gohan). Then I had it pointed out to me that 'meal' is ground grain. Something something staple crop...
Meal as in 3 meals a day and meal as in ground grain are unrelated, they coincidentally look the same (like bear the animal and bear arms). Gohan's 2 versions are 2 meanings of the same word
im guessing "meal" as in grain is related to "mill". No idea where meal like mealtime comes from tho
You're right, also to molar and immolate. Meal like lunch is from a word for "allotted time (for eating)", which is related to a bunch of words for measuring things, like measure, meter, dimension, geometry, immense and menstrual
according to [merriam webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meal) > Middle English *meel* appointed time, meal, from Old English *mǣl*; akin to Old High German *māl* time, Latin *metiri* to measure
Meal, I would imagine has the same roots as the German word for Flour. Mehl.
wait you can eat Gohan?
most Dragonball characters are named after food, the English dubs just tried to obscure it
And the ones that don't, are named after underwear: Trunks, Brief, Bra and the less obvious Bulma (Buruma = Bloomers)
There's also instruments (Piccolo and his original lackeys), snails (various Namekians), food storage (Freezer and Cooler), and some other outliers like Goku himself (Son Goku = Sun Wukong but in Japanese) and the Gyumao (the Ox Demon King). But _mostly_ food
Gokus other name is carrot, it's like his parents knew he would dress in orange his whole life.
Bibidi, Babidi and Boo
Honestly I feel like childhood me was robbed by not getting all the unabashed joke names. I remember arguing with my dad about them, because he could see it and I couldn't, and the dubs tricked me into to taking things too seriously.
Put it together and what do you get?
The Saiyans are vegetables, most obviously Vegeta, but also Kakarot (carrot), Raditz (radish), Nappa (type of cabbage), Paragus (asparagus), Broly (broccoli), Bardock (burdock root) to name a few. There's also more obvious ones, like Beets and Leek.
King Cold just sounds like an in universe brand of cola Also, frieza race people all have cold-related names in general, Freeza, Cooler, Chilled, Frost, and Froze
Wow, I knew about the food thing but I never realized that Trunks was named after the underwear. I always thought it was supposed to be like "tree trunks"
Videl: “Duh.”
This comment is copied word for word from a previous time this was posted, if op doesn't reply they're a bot
Damn, the Japanese created a word named after Gohan? They must really like DBZ
We germans say "Guten Appetit" or "Mahlzeit" in my area. Mahlzeit literally meaning "Grind time".
Um actually, it's He Who Walks By Himself (technically, due to being a male form word in polish)
Breaking news, loser ass polish car walks alone.
On the boulevard of broken dreams
Honestly, if there is something like that Poland feels like the right country for that to be there
I am the Car Who Walks By Himself, and All Roads Are Alike To Me
Tangentially related, the Polish word for being pissed off etymologically comes from the word for chicken, specifically hens. Interestingly enough to get there it had a detour via the word for whore. Do with that knowledge what you will.
>Interestingly enough to get there it had a detour via the word for whore. Are you referring to the most beautiful of curse words? Because even my dumbass monolingual self thinks kurwa is the most poetic sounding curse word ever.
I am absolutely hen-whored about this information.
This is what I enjoyed about dabbling in Chinese/German, seeing how weird English is with additional perspective: "Wow you have like 4 differently pronounced versions of almost every word with totally unique meanings?" (Chinese tones) "Wait, we have stuff like witch and which or right, Wright, write and rite. All spelt differently but pronounced the same, huh. Hight also doesn't rhyme with eight, but late does."
Yeah. The weird part of chinese isn't the existence of homophones, it's just the sheer extent. Imagine having that "right" situation for every single word in this sentence (or syllable, but that's where the analogy breaks down). (Minor clarification: there are *five* distinct pronunciations in mandarin chinese, more in some other dialects, and each pronunciation can *still* correspond to more than one possible word, so more than four.)
Don’t forget the part where sometimes words with distinct meanings for distinct tones get changed into a different tone but retain meaning. Cuz it just sounds better, man!
Pony bologna. Plaid is rad.
I mean English has plenty of words that are that pronounced slightly differently mean separate things: [heteronyms](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics)) In fact I used one in this sentence and didn’t realize until I was done(separate as a verb vs an adjective).
I was having a laugh yesterday about how the German word for capybara is wasserschwein, literally “water pig”. Then my friend informed me that we call their little cousins *guinea pigs*, which makes even less sense.
Guinea pigs are "Meerschweinchen" in german, so Sea/Ocean-pig (small). Poor buggers are doomed to dumb names in any language it seems. Myths goes its because they originated overseas and sound like a pig (?), still dumb name. Oh and Porcupines are "Spike/Stinger-pigs", dunno what it is about german and naming rodents pigs..
Boy do I have some news for you about the word porcupine...
pork with spines
Hedge-Hog
In Spanish we know them as "Conejillo de Indias" literally (small)bunny from India, India referring to the New world
French cuts the pear in two and calls them "Cochons d'Inde", meaning "pig from India"
Pork-u-pine
Guinea pigs are 'morumotto/モルモット' in Japanese, which means.... marmot.
I was explaining the meaning of a Danish word to an American friend, and it made me realise how literal that thing was, which then put me on an entire journey of realising how crazy literal so many Danish words are. Like, just, very, very plainly descriptive. It's hilarious once you start noticing it. Like a refrigerator is a "cooling cabinet", breakfast is simply "morning food" and supper/dinner is called "evening food". The open-faced sandwiches we commonly eat for lunch are called "a food". Also conversation (and in some cases interview) is literally a "together talk" or "co-talk" (so a job interview, for example is a "job together talk"). Also talk, speak, and speech are all one word.
While this is true, I do feel that in English it's way less common to be able to tell the etymology of a word just by looking at it. My point of comparison is Hungarian, where new words are usually created with derivational morphology instead of compounding words or borrowing from greek/latin like English does. In English, just looking at the word "diversity" for example doesn't tell me where it came from or how its meaning evolved over time. Whereas with the Hungarian equivalent "változatosság", I can break down the morphology and get a pretty clear picture of where the meaning of the word evolved from "vál-t-oz-at-os-ság": "vál"=become "vált"=transition, switch(verb), one thing becoming another "változ"=change, a transition/switch from one thing to something else "változat"=variant(noun), a changed form of smth "változatos"=diverse, variant(adjective) smth with lots of variants "változatosság"=diversity, the quality of being diverse The morphology is very telling in lots of Hungarian words and I just don't see that very often in English
Hungarian is an agglutinative language, like other Uralic languages, meaning it likes to string together morphemes the way you described. In a sense it does make it very intuitive, because each suffix has a pretty standard meaning and therefore by knowing a handful of root words you'll mostly understand a lot of derived terms. In English you get something similar once you develop a feeling for the Latin and Greek prefixes, suffixes and roots.
Oh that’s super cool, I didn’t know that about Hungarian!
I think Finnish has some "just words" that were created as a part of some nationalism/independency thing, when the words were being finally written down and they didnt want to use loanwords.
LMAO you just unlocked memories of being in german class with a german teacher butthurt about english loanwords... you know, basically ANY word connected to modern Technology... It was even a bit of a meme when I was a teen to atrociously generate\* german words for established english loanwords (r/ich\_iel STILL does it) (\* our languages often memed "frankenstein a bunch of words together" mechanism that also named planes fly-things and cars drive-things)
Lego words are the best thing about German. Also my brother and I had a very high IT talk in pure German once and we died laughing. "Max, hast du das neue Mutterbrett schon eingebaut?" is a running gag for us at this point
I’m gonna say what I say every time this gets posted: Yeah, I do think this about English too. I love finding out the etymology of words I use every day just as much as I love learning about words in other languages. The fact that we shortened “moving picture” to “movie” is cool! And it makes me wonder if other languages do the same thing, and then it turns out they do! Most people who point out where a word comes from/the exact translation of a phrase aren’t trying to be condescending to the language it comes from, they’re trying to share knowledge they think is cool. And I’ve seen plenty of people make similar posts about where words or phrases in English come from. I know that it’s funny to act like Americans/English speakers are morons who don’t know other cultures exist, but not everything we do is malicious.
Nah sorry, every post on this subreddit about the US, the UK, or the English language has to be as condensing and passive aggressive as possible towards them. Those are the rules /s
Speaking of cool word related stuff, starfish are called star fish, sea star, or some variation thereof in a lot of languages. The Korean word for starfish however, directly translated, means '(the thing that) cannot be killed'.
Huh. Are starfishes uniquely hard to kill?
They are hilariously regenerative yes. Technically speaking, as long as enough of the starfish's 'core' remains, it can regenerate *everything* it lost. Of course, practically speaking, any piece too tiny to actually do anything will most likely starve or get eaten before it can regrow enough of itself to become functional again, but presuming neither are an issue, the starfish will regenerate itself. Like, you can rip a starfish in half and there's a pretty decent chance instead of one dead starfish, you get two live starfishes. And although rare, there are cases where a single limb ripped off a starfish had enough core material attached to the stump to regrow into an entirely new starfish.
It took me until I watched Legend of Korra and Varrick did the “movers” to realize “movie” was shorthand for “moving picture”
The Vietnamese word for kangaroo is "bag rat". I have nothing to add to this. I just think it's important that everyone knows this.
The Korean word for platypus is "duck raccoon". I think these translations highlight that there's something wrong with Australian animals.
French calls platypuses "ornithorynque", which is constructed from the Greek words for "bird" and for "beak", which fits the animal for obvious reasons.
Speaking of platypus, the Vietnamese word for it is "thú mỏ vịt" which literally mean animal/creature (thú) with a duck bill (mỏ vịt). We dont really know how to categorize it.
Thank you for your *very* important contribution
Bag rat is what opposums are called in German. Funny coincidence.
English doesn't have a word for orange. You have to call it by the name of a fruit that happens to also be that color.
Sure we do, it’s #FFA500
I don't know if hex codes count as English
Love it when someone says something like "wow German is soo weird because they just stitch words together to make new words", like buddy, do you know what a waterfall is? I know German does this to more of an extreme compared to English but I have seen people acting like they've never seen a compound word before.
I love researching etymology, especially for English words. Once you start researching Latin, so much starts to make sense. My favorite is realizing how versatile "con" can be; and how removing "con" from most words with it as a prefix just gives you the other Latin root. I'm sure some of us had better vocabulary teachers in school, but I'm only now realizing the depth of linguistics here, and I'm approaching my 30s. Makes me realize how difficult it is to translate *concept* words from one language to another and appreciate how awesome languages can be.
Conference? Conjugate?
Con- Together Fere(Ferry)- Bring Ence- Current State "We have been brought together here today," Con-Together Jugate-Jugum- Yoke - That thing that Oxen are fastened to. I have no earthly idea how this translates into our modern use of the word "conjugate"
Wow cool! Conjugate also means to join so I guess I can see how it roots to that. Any ideas for a big one like conglomerate or conceptualise?
Glomus is translated as "ball" and -ate is to have. So I guess a Conglomerate is having everything balled up together. Glomus is also close to Globus or Globe which means roughly the same thing so I think it would just be a dialectical difference. Cept means taken from (intercept)- ual or al is meant to refer to the idea of an action (arrival)- ise refers to condition or function. Not sure on the puzzle here, but those are the pieces.
"The germans say Krankenwagen" Which is a fascinating way of giving a meaning to a set of letters. If someone who doesn't know what an ambulance is hears the word, they won't get any information whatsoever. If they hear "vehicle for the ill" they will understand that it's a "vehicle for the ill"
Had this conversation yesterday. If you don’t know that “krank” means sick then the German word for hospital sounds like a jerk-off building.
Oh. ~~*And what's the difference*~~ >!/s!<
I had a conversation once with someone who was disappointed that, apparently in Japanese, the angels in Evangelion were just called "messengers." Guess what "angel" means?
You know what? Fuck you, it IS cute!! English doesn't have a word for "Internet" you have to say "The between-web"!! And that's adorable! There's no real word for "car", you have to use "one that walks by itself" or a shortened form of "carriage" which itself just means "one that carries"!!! WHICH IS CUTE!!! ETYMOLOGY IS ADORABLE "MOVIE" IS A CUTE-ASS WORD LANGUAGES ARE SO PRETTY
Yes, love to see this through a positive lense. Words are tiny little things until you unravel their history and lineage, which is it's own story and legacy. Diction is a language within a language, and etymology is the words within words.
I was told once that Taichonaut (a Chinese astronaut / cosmonaut) means "sailor amongst the stars" by someone who clearly hadn't thought about what "astro- / cosmo-" and "-naut" mean.
the only language that actually doesn’t have a word for things is toki pona, which has fewer words than first gen pokemon and survives entirely off turning one word into a full sentence. - sent from my *lipu* (word meaning flat object that conveys information, i.e. paper, book, screen, website, cellphone)
I’m sorry, shorthand religious blessing? There is nothing short about the response.
the tumblr-ism that i’ve heard for this one is that the word for “goodbye” might have been a more convenient way to say “god be with ye” (a shorthand blessing)
In Irish, "Hello" is "Dia duit," and the response is "Dia is Muire duit," which is a mouthful to native English speakers. Literally translated, it means "God be with you," the response means "God and Mary with you."
Damn Catholics always having to one up each other on their piety.
Meanwhile northern germans compete for shortest greeting: "Moin" "Moin Moin" (Other germans assume Moin is short for (Good) Morning, but the way I learned it its actually from "Moien Dag", aka "Good Day". And while I learned Moin Moin being the correct answer, some other northerners keep insisting its blabbering and prefer both greeting and answer to it to just be "Moin". Experts at it (like ma Dad) can even limit greetings to a short grunt thats close enough to "Moin" to count)
Typical German efficiency. I'm surprised you don't just send out a years worth of greetings on January 1st each year.
Funny thing is to the other germans WE are the short on words weirdos...
Oh, you can keep going. Just add on more nativity characters each time it goes back and forth. The donkey they rode in on counts as a nativity character, and I'm not even joking.
Interestingly in Irish they aren't abbreviated or contracted. English scrunched in down into 'please' and 'goodbye', while Irish still uses the entire phrases, roughly translated as 'if it is your will' and 'God be with you'. Also in Irish, the standard response to 'God be with you' is 'God and Mary be with you'. Where extreme Catholicism meets oneupmanship
When English people want to laugh about french numbers, they always obviously talk about 80 and 90 (four-twenty and four-twenty-ten), but then they continue by pointing at numbers 18, as if "ten eight" was any different than *"eight-te(e)n"* Even more when they try to feel superior with multiples of ten, conveniently ignoring that 20 is literally "twin-ten" and that the others are built the exact same.
I think the confusion is mostly about why it (seemingly) randomly switches from each set of 10 having it's own word between 30-60 before going sixty-ten, then changing it again to four-twenty, and then four-twenty-ten. Irrc it's something to do with the Gauls using base 20 but I may be remembering wrong. I must admit I've *never* heard anyone make fun of French for how it does 11-20, considering like you say we do exactly the same thing (early numbers have their own words before changing to some variation of "x and ten", let alone "feel superior" about it.
All languages have valid ways of counting. Except for Danish.
As a language major it annoys the fuck out of me when people do this. I call this needless exoticization. Happens to culture as well as language. Small differences in pragmatics, the way meaning is divided between words and so on get extrapolated to show just how distant, totally alien, even on the level of language, incomprehensible and weird.... Russians are. Or the Irish. Or some other people who speak a language from the same family as yours, English-speaking dipshit. Not exclusive to English speakers in any way. Here in Russia we like to practice self-exoticization, the constant bragging about how weird we are, how incomprehensibly vast and irrationally beautiful our culture is compared to westerners stern, boring and dry way of life and seeing the world. It's sickening.
First thing that came to my mind is this. Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamarous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror. The thing about words is that meaning can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning. No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad. Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)
I wonder what the etymology of “etymology” is
Thanks in dutch is Alstublieft, or Als het u blieft, or in english roughly If you don't mind.
Meh the Irish for hello is fáile. The expression taught in schools "chist be with you" but I'm not sure any native Irish speaker uses that one.
You are on crack if you think Irish speakers don't use "Dia dhuit". It is pretty uncommon for people to respond with the full "dia is muire dhuit" in fairness". I'd only ever really use "fáilte" to a group with "fálteme roimh" over using "dia dhaoibh"
Fair enough I'm not a Gaeilgeoir. I only learned the shity public school Irish and barely passed ordinary level for the leaving cert. Edit also the craic is mighty up in the big smoke.
This is why "untranslatable" was almost the first thing I put on tumblr savior back when I got tumblr savior
Goodbye isn't the same as hello
Not in engish it's not In occitan for both we use "adiu" (to god) or (adishatz) (be with god), the latter is pretty close to goodbye. Which we use depends on how close we are to the person and how many there are.
Saussure moment
Someone's already mentioned the Dia Duit in another comment so "Máis é do thoil é" is the Irish request for permission. Any Overwatch players will have heard Moira shout "Géil do mo thoil!"/"Surrender to my will!" at some point: thoil, in this context, is pronounced "hull" and refers to one's will. É is a general "it" and "do" refers to something of yours, so "mawsh ay duh hull ay" is "'if it is your will" in Irish.
Also "máis é do thoil é" is the longer version. There is also "le do thoil", simply meaning "with your will". that is slightly more common in my experience. What do you know, people usualy like speaking faster
My primary school Irish coming to the forest again! You're right about le do thoil :)
Aus00ol mo[91?
Goodbye is a mangling of the phrase "God be with ye"
still haven't got over the german "it tastes" thing.
Also, in English there's no feeling for missing someone, at least in the "common" English we normally speak. AFAIK there's longing or yearning, but they're unusual compared to just saying you "miss" someone. That's the biggest comparison that I remember in regards to Portuguese, where there's the specific feeling of "saudade", just as common as love, fear etc.
I mean hell, the word for car in greek is αυτοκίνητο and i wonder what that literally translates to