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English is weird
oddtail:
For the record, "-ski" does mean something in Polish. It's a suffix that makes an adjective out of a word. Many (possibly most) adjectives end with it.
So Polish for "sky/heaven" is "niebo", and the word we have for "blue" is "niebieski". "Poland" <--> "Polska" and "Polish" <--> "polski" (the word "Polska" is itself an adjectival form of a word for "field/plain"). And the like.
Also, a LOT of surnames, often surnames of people whose ancestors were nobility, end with "-ski". The most common Polish surname is "Kowalski", and "kowal" is a word for a smith, usually a blacksmith (yes, the most common Polish surname is basically Smith, kinda like in UK/USA. Go figure).
I'll shut up now, because this is getting way off-topic for the thread ;)
Is it cold in here?:
Academics say English is a dialect of Mandarin
Case:
--- Quote from: Akima on 02 Sep 2019, 16:33 ---German-speakers adopting English words, and pronouncing them (to my ears, at least) in a very "English" way. I was intrigued that German didn't have "native" words for whiteboard or whiteboard-marker, but apparently the German translation of blackboard is "Tafel", which doesn't have a colour-word incorporated in it, so I suppose the obvious route of swapping the colour didn't apply.
[...]
Plainly the Germans are confident enough to feel no special need to invent new "native" words for new things. Compare and contrast l'Académie Français and l'aéroglisseur vs. l’hovercraft.
--- End quote ---
'Tafel' simply means 'board' - from the Latin 'tabula'. Same word-root as 'table'.
Sometimes we do 'invent' new words instead of using loanwords - e.g. 'Computer' and 'Rechner' (the German word for 'Computer') are used interchangeably. But nothing like the zeal of l'Académie Français, that's true.
cybersmurf:
--- Quote from: Case on 05 Sep 2019, 03:53 ---[
'Tafel' simply means 'board' - from the Latin 'tabula'. Same word-root as 'table'.
Sometimes we do 'invent' new words instead of using loanwords - e.g. 'Computer' and 'Rechner' (the German word for 'Computer') are used interchangeably. But nothing like the zeal of l'Académie Français, that's true.
--- End quote ---
TBH, out of context "Rechner" means calculator. But let's face it - so does computer, in a way.
it gets weird if foreign words get Germanized and bent to German grammar.
I wonder how often English bastardises words like that.
Morituri:
I was thinking today, that there ought to be a word, for the kind of nostalgia I feel when I realize the future isn't what it used to be.
There used to be optimism, as everyone seemed to expect that the future would be better than the past. I miss that.
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