81–90 of 103 posts
There are just some things all human speaker communities need to talk about. Since these tend to be "ultraconserved" words, using the Swadesh list is a great way to understand the lineage of a given under-documented language, but a bad way to understand any rule-based mechanisms associated with that language such as morphology associated with inflection or declension.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But nothing is that simple. Chocolate got mixed up, for example. It's an aztec compound word for the drink made from the plant (xocolatl == "bitter water", per wikipedia). The original term for the plant itself in the sense we use it was the unrelated mayan word cacao.
Cacao and chocolate both come from Nahuatl words (cacaua and xocolatl, respectively, though note that there was also a drink called cacahuaatl: “atl” = water). According to Wiktionary the xocolatl case is actually a bit uncertain (not much evidence of that word in use before 1750), and there are some competing theories that it was maybe related to the word for a stirring stick, or maybe descended from the Yucatec May…
The link between a word's length and its "usefulness" is fascinating too. The shorter the word, the more central, fundamental and frequent its use, as a rule of thumb. [0] One glaring exception is "conscientiousness" -- a personality trait that has been the nr. 1 performance predictor in jobs that require results (execution as opposed to ideas), across time and industries. Clearly central, but 17 characters! O_o [0]…
Central here should be read as "important and used frequently everyday" (which conscientiousness is not at all), not central as in "the notion identified by the word is important in some domain" (besides conscientiousness does not even qualify that much even for this latter criterion).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Opposite of the topic (ultra-nonconserved?), "butterfly" is a word that is strangely different in even closely related European languages (Romance, Teutonic, Slavic). Doing a cursory check in Google Translate now, but I've one found one language pair where the words appear to be related: French: "papillon", Catalan "papallona". Otherwise: mariposa, бабочка, motyl, schmetterling, vlinder, sommerfugl, fjäril, farfalla,…
I was amused to realise that Turkey (the animal) has a wide range of different names, often a country foreign to the language. i.e in Turkey they call Turkey Indian, in Portugal they call it Peru, in Malay it's a Dutch Chicken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_names_for_turkeys
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet in Polish the word "czaj" also exists and it means a very strong tea. Herbata seems to come from Latin, as it relates to herbs.
Interesting, I never actually encountered "czaj" used to describe tea. From a quick search it seems to be either prison slang, or a word used in eastern Poland, coming from Russia. And then there's "czajnik" for teapot.
Here's a previous thread from when this was originally posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5669179 I remember, because I made two of my most researched comments there [1]. :) I'm no historical linguist, but I'd take this finding with a bunch of grains of salt. Eurasiatic language families that seek to combine, say, Proto-Indo-European [2] and Altaic [3] languages are pretty controversial, and in general this…
I would have guessed that, on the basis of utility, the conservation of words would fundamentally be a function of their meaning, and, for the most part, that function would be fairly constant across all human cultures, regardless of the specific languages used by those cultures (again on grounds of their utility.) From that perspective, would it be all that surprising if approximately the same set of meanings were conserved even in languages with no common history?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why 'strangely' different? Why would you expect such exotic animals to be ultra-nonconserved? Schmetterling may be semantically linked to butterfly via 'batter-fly' (beater-fly) also: motyl~moth sommerfugl~summer-fly interesting that wiktionary for papillon shows a puppy :) might also be linked to big pupils and fake eyes [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/papillon
You would expect closely related languages to have similar words for a common animal, i.e. to be at least somewhat conserved. I do find it mysterious. Another one: Dutch vlinder, Afrikaans (very close descendant) schoenlapper. I think the papillon dog breed has big, butterfly-like ears!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why 'strangely' different? Why would you expect such exotic animals to be ultra-nonconserved? Schmetterling may be semantically linked to butterfly via 'batter-fly' (beater-fly) also: motyl~moth sommerfugl~summer-fly interesting that wiktionary for papillon shows a puppy :) might also be linked to big pupils and fake eyes [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/papillon
> Schmetterling may be semantically linked to butterfly via 'batter-fly' (beater-fly) No, it's semantically linked via 'butter'. Schmetterling comes from Schmetten or Schmand which is a sort of heavy cream. There used to be a folk believe that butterflies would consume milk or butter if left uncovered. They were also sometimes called Milkdieb or milk-thief in German. See: www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=butterfly
Butter + Schmetten/смета́на • (smetána) probably still come from beat:schmetternsmith and or smeltan:smelt.
Where do Schmeissfliege (blowfly) and Schmalz(molten fat) sit? ;)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Schmetterling may be semantically linked to butterfly via 'batter-fly' (beater-fly) No, it's semantically linked via 'butter'. Schmetterling comes from Schmetten or Schmand which is a sort of heavy cream. There used to be a folk believe that butterflies would consume milk or butter if left uncovered. They were also sometimes called Milkdieb or milk-thief in German. See: www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=butterfly
Interesting. Butter + Schmetten/смета́на • (smetána) probably still come from beat:schmettern smith and or smeltan:smelt. Where do Schmeissfliege (blowfly) and Schmalz(molten fat) sit? ;)