Yeah, ‘the brown one’ is a referential form that nominalizes in Indo-European languages form Lithuanian to Greek. In Russian, too, one gets ‘myedved’ for the animal in question: literally “the one who eats honey.” The first part of that last one is recognizable as the ‘mead’ word in English. I could go on but there are much more exciting things going on todayyyyyyyyyy
3 Likes
1 Like
You have to admit it’s got a lot more going on than
5 Likes
This is even worse than “canary”. The word is most directly associated with the bird, but it originally referred to the Canary islands. They’re called that because one of them was home to a lot of wild dogs (canis, as in canine… so “canary” for dogs, like an “aviary” which is home to birds, or a “library”…) or possibly because of all the seals there (seal = canis marinus, sea dog). Eventually, a species of birds endemic to the Canary islands, the canary bird, became known simply as the “canary”, to the point where now people think that “canary” is a bird and so “Canary islands” must be where the birds are from… which is true, but that’s not where the name comes from. The bird was named after the island, and the island was named after its dogs (or seals).
So the Canary islands are the dog islands, the canary bird is the dog-island bird… and canary yellow is “dog-island bird” yellow… which is funny because wild canaries (the ones in the Canary islands) aren’t actually yellow; The color only appeared after the birds started being bred in captivity.
Fun fun fun.
10 Likes
Also, salad is named after salt and lettuce is named after milk. And soup is named after bread!
6 Likes
New to me, thanks!
I’m partial to this one:
4 Likes
4 Likes
Not only was naming an arth by its name taboo, so was killing them. In all regions in Europe where the bear is still common and hunted this is still surrounded by rituals like bringing the bear’s head to a feast that evening.
3 Likes
The seminal paper on the semantics of modal auxiliaries: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-linguistics/article/abs/semantics-of-modal-verbs/33BCC501B9C7D7DC1E599B68887981B5
John Searle used to claim that thinking about them too hard drives people crazy.
2 Likes
Now I am glad that I actually never found pen and paper …
3 Likes
What about Torpenhow Hill?
It either means Hill-Hill-Hill Hill or Torpen’s Hill Hill.
4 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
