The interesting Etymology thread

[Deleted User]

No idea if this is really true or not, all I know is that after I heard the story I just like to believe it.

Apparently when the first English (cough) "explorers" :rolleyes: landed in Australia a European man had never seen a kangaroo before. One of the sailors managed to gesture to a native Aborigine, pointing and got his question "what is that thing called" understood despite the language barrier. The native replied "kangaroo".

The tribe in question had no written language or alphabet at that time, so it was a number of years before it was discovered that "kan-ga-roo" translates as "I haven't a clue!"

Maybe it's BS, I just like the story too much to research it properly and disappoint myself.

Mimon

RulesOfNature wrote: »

French? Are you joking? If English is a combination of anything its Germanic + Latin/Greek.

Google every word you typed in that post and see that its pretty much all Germanic + Greco/Roman. French has traces of grammatical influence, but its not at all similar with English. Loanwords are the main influence of French on English.

Not true. French has had a way bigger influence on English than Latin and Greek.

RulesOfNature

Mimon wrote: »

Not true. French has had a way bigger influence on English than Latin and Greek.

I assume that you're misconstruing Normans as French, when in reality they are Vikings, closer to the Anglo-Saxons in culture and language than the Gallic French.

Mimon

RulesOfNature wrote: »

I assume that you're misconstruing Normans as French, when in reality they are Vikings, closer to the Anglo-Saxons in culture and language than the Gallic French.

The Normans spoke Norman French which indeed heavily influenced English!

The Vikings who settled in Normandy married mostly French women so they quickly took on French culture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_language

[Deleted User]

misterbizmuth wrote: »

No idea if this is really true or not, all I know is that after I heard the story I just like to believe it.

Apparently when the first English (cough) "explorers" :rolleyes: landed in Australia a European man had never seen a kangaroo before. One of the sailors managed to gesture to a native Aborigine, pointing and got his question "what is that thing called" understood despite the language barrier. The native replied "kangaroo".

The tribe in question had no written language or alphabet at that time, so it was a number of years before it was discovered that "kan-ga-roo" translates as "I haven't a clue!"

Maybe it's BS, I just like the story too much to research it properly and disappoint myself.

Afaik....the abboriginals had the same word for dog as the english....despite both never interacting in previous 40 odd thousand years


So yous will not think im mad
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language

Mimon

Blaaz_ wrote: »

Afaik....the abboriginals had the same word for dog as the english....despite both never interacting in previous 40 odd thousand years


So yous will not think im mad
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language

Interesting, thanks for that. Looks like a total coincidence.

Dog seems to be a bit of a mystery of where it came from and why it surplanted the word hund.

Best theory I've heard is that dog originally meant a strong muscly type of dog but it somehow became the main word for all dogs.

souter

Blaaz_ wrote: »

Afaik....the abboriginals had the same word for dog as the english....despite both never interacting in previous 40 odd thousand years


So yous will not think im mad
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language

Just to be pedantic, as noted in the citation, there are multiple Australasian languages, many of which are not mutually understandable.
Academic linguistics have built careers on the recollections of a handful (if lucky) speakers, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyirbal_language

iamstop

The etmology of the various names for black people has been discussed earlier. Here is an article about a change to that.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/13/person-of-colour-added-to-irish-lexicon

Interesting to see it happening in our time.

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😄

[Deleted User]

Hope this one is true - I never did check it myself.

Back before printing news papers and so on - the news of the day had to be left in places where as many people as possible would see it. So it was often left displayed at junctions where any three or more road would meet.

The word for a "way" was "Via" and the word for "three" was "Tri". So basically the latin word for a meeting of three roads was trivium.

And it's apparently from this we get the word "Trivia" today.

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https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=trivia