This is a thread where you can talk about the etymology of certain words as well as what is so great (or horrible) about languages in particular. Nothing is stopping you from conversing about everything from grammar to spelling!
Begin the merriment of posting!
The Polish phonetic equivalent of "eventually" (ewentualnie) means "optionally". Weird, huh?
Edited by AoeAbility on May 1st 2022 at 1:00:03 AM
You keep using the term "POV". I do not think it means what you think it means.Yeah. If I remember correctly, that sort of thing is called "false friends".
Hello! I'm Emu Otori. Emu is meaning SMILE!![]()
Not quite. Aside from "possible, but not certain or necessary" meaning, it's often used in either/or context.
Do you pronounce the “l” in “guillotine” or not?
Come on! Let's bless them all until we get fershnickered!![]()
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Still kinda weird when you think about it.
When it comes to country names, what's the difference in connotations between "Republic of X" and "X-ian Republic"?
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If you want to be faithful to the French pronunciation (as the word is borrowed into English from French), you pronounce it like "y". And also, the "u" is silent. So "gee-yoh-teen" (or "gee-yoh-tin" to be even more faithful). That said, apparently both that and the more straightforward but inaccurate pronunciations of "gill-oh-teen" and "gill-oh-tin" are standard/acceptable.
There's no difference in connotations, as far as I'm aware.
Hello! I'm Emu Otori. Emu is meaning SMILE!The Italian equivalent of the French "LL" would be "GLI", which is pronounced like an L with the tongue sticking to the palate
. Though I never personally heard this sound pronounced by English or French speakers. So I avoid using it when I'm not speaking Italian.
I was today years old when I found out that "judgment" isn't spelled with an e after the g in American English. I always thought it was spelled that way.
Get taxed. Idiot.I watched Defunctland's video about The Wiggles' dark ride and learned that "skivves" apparently means a turtleneck in Australia. I'm wondering if it's countrywide term or exclusive to New South Wales.
I was taken aback when I first heard that because it means underwear here in the States.
Get taxed. Idiot.I occasionally forget that Spanish is also quite prone to Separated by a Common Language. Given that it's spoken in over 20 countries, though, it makes sense.
In my Spanish class, we're reading a book that has the word "coger" in it quite often. Well, "coger" literally just means "to take", "to catch", or "to pick up"... but in some countries, "coger" also means "to fuck".
The Spanish teacher had to explain this to us.
Cold turkey's getting stale. Tonight I'm eating crow.I was recently amused by an American author who wrote a tweet commenting on how Separated by a Common Language and the Scunthorpe Problem collided in the UK edition of her novel: since "pants" means "trousers" in the US but "underwear" in the UK, the editors replaced every instance of "pants" with "trousers"... But they did so with the "find and replace" tool, which meant the book also referred to the "occutrousers" of a building
(occupants, get it?)
Edited by MikeK on May 12th 2023 at 11:32:18 AM
Wow, less than two weeks shy of a whole year since I asked that question. Thanks for the answer; it makes a lot of sense now that I think about it, even though I find the distinction silly since you can simply define "Ruritania" as "the political entity representing the will of the Ruritanian people as a singular whole and the territory that they inhabit".
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.I admit I hadn't even noticed the dates!
Some countries are named after the people who live there, while in other cases, the people who live there are named after the country. Jordanians are people from Jordan, the country of the Jordan River. But Turkey is the Land of the Turks, named after the Central Asian people who migrated to Asia Minor (or Anatolia) and "converted" the people who live there from speaking whatever languages they spoke to speaking Turkish. Americans are named after America, which in turn is named after some Italian guy who had relatively little to do with North and South America (and "Americans"—in English—is usually used to mean only people from one particular part of North and South America).
It gets complicated. "England" is "the land of the English"—that is, originally, the Angles (as in the Anglo-Saxons, the Angles and the Saxons). But, the Angles may have gotten their name from the "angle" of land where Denmark connects with the mainland of Europe. (There are several competing theories.
) So, conceivably, you could have a country named after the people who live there, who in turn are named after a geographic feature in some different country where their ancestors used to live centuries ago. (But "Saxons" probably means "the people who use this one particular kind of knife"
. Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt and Lower Saxony, in Germany, and Essex and Wessex and Sussex and Middlesex, in England, are all named after the People of [that particular kind of] Knife.)
I feel like every now and then someone will say something like "(Foreign language) is weird, because if you don't pronounce their word for (ordinary term) correctly, you're going to end up saying (something obscene, profane, or just a Non Sequitur)", but really, English is also like that.
If you don't pronounce the English word for "ship" correctly, you're going to end up saying "shit".
Cold turkey's getting stale. Tonight I'm eating crow.Now, that's an odd sentiment. There are only so many sounds a human vocal apparatus can make, and so many things to name... Incidentally, what I find odd/interesting about English is that you guys (we guys? I'm sort of bilingual, huge amount of typos notwithstanding) feel the need to name absolutely freaking everything. Everything. How is everyday discourse improved by having a name for "aglet"? In my native language, most people would just describe it. And nowadays, there's a rush of terms, most of them calques from English, which made little sense in English but absolutely none ooutside of it. That's a bit confusing.
Nitpick but aglet is not a word that comes up in conversation. I am pretty sure it blew up in public conscience because of a Phineas and Ferb song. It only really matters when you are talking about shoemaking and other jargon.
English having so many words for things isn't something I thought about.
Edited by MacronNotes on May 16th 2023 at 1:56:29 PM
Macron's notesEnglish really does have a lot of words for things. Some people say that German has a lot of unique words, and really, it does, but English for some reason has a word for tricking someone into watching the music video for "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley.
Speaking of German, some literal translations of German words can be pretty interesting given that a lot of them are compounds of existing words. Also helps that some German words are cognates; two of them I know of are "Grillparty" (barbecue) and "Antibabypillen" (birth control pills). And yes, those are both real German words.
Non-cognate, but still interesting literal German translations I know of include Faultier (sloth / lazy animal) and Flugzeug (airplane / flying thing).
Cold turkey's getting stale. Tonight I'm eating crow.Hah, "aglet" was the first example that came into my head :) German, as far as I know, is much more agglutinative than English, so new words can be made by gluing together existing words (which is what agglutinative means), and you sometimes do that in English, but mostly, there's a dizzifying variety of old, new, borrowed and blue words. Don't get me wrong, the more the merrier, but remembering all these is a headache. Example: you have a "swan" and "cygnet", a baby swan. Now, if you don't know a thing about etymology and Latin (where "cygnus" means "swan"), you're left needing to remember that two completely different words refer to related things. In my native language, Polish, you create such words systemically (systematically? I'm not sure of the English word): swan is "łabędź", and baby swan is "łabędziątko" (or "łabądek"), so we have less roots and more flexibility.
And no, I'm not complaining. Both ways have their merits. The thing is, (watch out, pet peeve), languages are as different as people. We can't all be the same person, and we can't all speak the same language. English has a tendency to borrow and hoard - have a look at this article: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/surprising-uncommon-words
Out of 13 words, how many have Polish equivalent?
1. biblioklept - obviously borrowed from Greek. We'd just describe the concept.
2. acnestis - also sounds Greek, also no Polish equivalent that I know of.
3. meldrop - you would probably say "gil" or "kapka", but these are not so grand-sounding and they also have other meanings.
4. octothorpe - "krzyżyk", "kratka" or "płotek". None of these words refers specifically to the sign, you need to read it in context.
5. nauseant - systemically created "mdlący" (note - this is an adjective, not a noun, like in English, but you can say "coś mdlącego" to turn it into a noun phrase).
6. augend/addend - I think there are terms for that, but they're technical and not used everyday.
7. obelus - no real name, it's sometimes called "sztylet" (dagger) or "krzyż filologów".
8. wrest pin - "kołek (do strojenia)". "Kołek" means any wooden pin.
9. agelast - Greek borrowing we'd just descibe.
10. amatorculist - (according to the article, uncommon even in English, but) we'd describe this.
11. pot-valor - this is, technically, a description already.
12. peristeronic - systematically derived "gołębi".
13. hirquiticke - no direct equivalent.
In general, as far as I can tell, Polish words have more homonimy (more referents to the same-shaped word), and of course, there's inflexion to bend them into the shapes we need. In a way, Polish is more frugal, having less tools but more ways to use them. English gets a huge box full of highly specialised tools, and when it lacks the perfect tool for the job, it makes or borrows a new one. Lately, though, more borrowings find their way into Polish - I don't think anything's changed in the English attitude.
Edited by Veanne on May 16th 2023 at 7:35:54 PM
Is there a word in any language for believing that you understood a concept, then, as you grow older and wiser realize that your initial understanding was rudimentary and simplistic and now you truly understand, only later, when you're older and wiser still, that you realize that your earliest understanding was the correct one after all?

Wiktionary claims that both the silent-r and nonsilent-r pronunciations exist in both the UK and the US.
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.