It does; the equivalent to the English/Greek-descended “o” is “yo” and it operates pretty similarly, but it comes after the noun being addressed/invoked instead of before.
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That paper obviously should have been named “Story of O”… What a missed opportunity. Incidentally, I have access to it.
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A tangent from here…
In Chinese, you can say “How are you?” as 你好嗎 ni hao ma, literally, “Are you good?” and in this form you are actually asking about how the person is.
If you just say 你好 ni hao that is just a greeting, not actually a question. The interesting part to me is that it drops the question particle, so you’re saying “You are good.” Which given the tendency to answer the phatic question in English with “Good” no matter how you’re really feeling, probably works well enough.
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But the correct answer to “How do you do?” is not “Good” but “Ahdeedoo?”. It might take some time to drill this into children but they learn it eventually.
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what makes this even more interesting to me is that in english, genericized names tend to keep their noun properties. however with “escalate” they made it into a verb.
And now I’m wondering if dump as a synonym for throw away predates or postdates dumpster.
Well, I suppose escalatory could count…
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It appears to predate it, though not necessarily by a terribly long time. Etymonline says:
of “unload en masse, cause to fall out by tilting up a cart, etc.” is recorded in American English by 1784. That of “discard, abandon” is from 1919.
The Dempster-Dumpster trash-hauling mechanism is from the 1930s, and the presumption seems to be that they named it because of the second meaning (though to me, the first sounds more plausible honestly).
Not giving the pronounciation of a thing you don’t want to be said out loud is ingenious
Gatekeeping to an extreme.
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In French, “chemin de fer” means railroad.
This has been stolen localized to “şimendifer” in Turkish. I believe this happened during Ottoman Empire’s last years but first usage’s in 1930 appearantly. In Turkish, the word went un undergone semantic extension. In addition to “railroad”, it also means “train” or “locomotive”.
It also became a noun in Turkish, the French original was a phrase. In fact, it seems to have become a noun in every language which borrowed it (English, Romanian, Turkish and possibly more.)
It also means a sort of card game however that meaning didn’t come to Turkish.
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Alexander the Great conquered Egypt, previously ruled by the Achaemenid Empire, in 332 BC. After Alexander’s death in 323 BC, one of his generals, Ptolemy I Soter, was appointed to govern Egypt, and eighteen years later, he declared himself Pharaoh, founding the Ptolemaic dynasty. It ended just short of three centuries later, in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopatra VII, after which Egypt became a Roman province. During the Ptolemaic dynasty, however, since the ruling elite was of Greek descent, Greek was the official language used in the court, but much of the native Egyptian populous only spoke Egyptian.[1][2]
That’s why the three inscriptions of the Rosetta Stone, which was carved during the Ptolemaic era, are in Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic (a script used for writing the Egyptian language), and Greek; official decrees were written in both languages to ensure that both Egyptian- and Greek-speaking citizens could read it.
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Dalmatian and Pomeranian are each the name of both a dog breed and a dead Indo-European language. In both cases, the words are derived from the names of regions: Dalmatia and Pomerania.
Also on the subject of dogs and dead languages, the ancient Sumerian proverb about the dog who entered a tavern really is the ur-bar joke[1].
“Ur” being the Sumerian word for dog. ↩︎
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Wasn’t there a Sumerian city named Ur? And does that mean there was a city named “Dog”?
Good question—the Sumerians called that city “Urim”, but unfortunately we don’t know why! Most of the Sumerian we know comes from, effectively, ancient Sumerian-to-Akkadian dictionaries written by Akkadian-speakers rather than authentic Sumerian texts, so figuring out etymologies is hard.
I previously thought it would be connected to the word uru “city”, but apparently scholars now believe that word was pronounced iri instead, so probably not.
(Bonus fun fact: a very small number of those dictionaries distinguish “O” from “U”, and those dictionaries suggest the city name should be pronounced “Orim”. It seems like there was one specific guy in Nippur, whose name is lost to time, who had his students write “O” and “U” differently when doing practice exercises. After his death everyone abandoned the concept.)
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Your post has made me wonder about “either/nor” and now I wish to misuse it.
In 2023, researchers excavating the ruins of Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite empire, discovered a tablet, written in Hittite, describing a religious ritual. The text contains a recitation in the previously-unknown Anatolian language Kalasmaic, once spoken in the city of Kalasma. As of yet, this is the only text in Kalasmaic to have been discovered, but analysis suggests that it may be part of the Luwic branch of the Anatolian language family.[1][2]
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How was this differentiation made? Did they just use plene spellings each time they wrote a sign with an “O” or “U” in it?
Being somewhat familiar with Quaker traditions, I already knew the distinction between “thee” and “thou”, but only more recently came to realize that simple “you” was the traditional plural form of you. Perhaps if the word “you” hadn’t been hijacked to mean the singular, we wouldn’t have a need for all these regional bastardizations https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/yall-youuns-yinz-youse-how-regional-dialects-are-fixing-standard-english
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