- Jun 28, 2004
- 8,296
- 20,805
Once again, another spillover and compliment to the Politics Thread
Linguistics and History and politics are closely link. For example, English lacks a distinction an inclusive and exclusive "we." Perhaps if we had a definitely inclusive "we," the liberal refrain of "we are stronger together," might have been interpreted by swing voters who felt left out from the economic prosperity of major cities. Maybe Hillary wins in 2016 if we had an inclusive "we" rather than our ambiguous "we."
We might as well start with the language of this board, English and it's past and relationship to places as diverse as Iceland and Bengal.
Here's the whole video, from the start.
Here's where he gets to the meat of it by comparing numbers from England, Italy, and South Asia.
Pancha is probably why we have the word "punch" since it was made of five things: hard liquor, sugar, citrus, water/tea, and nutmeg.
So this is just the first post.
We have an extremely diverse community here and if any one knows any idioms, common sayings, from a language that they know, other than English, please drop them in here with a literal translation into English of said idiom.
Edit: languages are always in flux so it can be hard to find these similarities. One of my favorite examples is that the German word for any animal is "Tier" but the English world is animal, an obviously Latinate word. However, deer sounds a lot like Tier and wouldn't you know it, the ancient Anglo-Saxons called all animals deer.
English is a faster moving and highly dynamic language whereas German is more static and conservative.
German is full of words which are obviously cognates with the King James Bible Germans call pigs Schwein which sounds a lot like Swine. Same for the sky, Germans say Himmel and in older versions of English we called the sky "the Heavens." German is basically like 17th century English in many ways. The examples go on and on.
But yeah, solving these puzzles is even more fun to me than Economics, TBH.
Linguistics and History and politics are closely link. For example, English lacks a distinction an inclusive and exclusive "we." Perhaps if we had a definitely inclusive "we," the liberal refrain of "we are stronger together," might have been interpreted by swing voters who felt left out from the economic prosperity of major cities. Maybe Hillary wins in 2016 if we had an inclusive "we" rather than our ambiguous "we."
We might as well start with the language of this board, English and it's past and relationship to places as diverse as Iceland and Bengal.
Here's the whole video, from the start.
Here's where he gets to the meat of it by comparing numbers from England, Italy, and South Asia.
Pancha is probably why we have the word "punch" since it was made of five things: hard liquor, sugar, citrus, water/tea, and nutmeg.
So this is just the first post.
We have an extremely diverse community here and if any one knows any idioms, common sayings, from a language that they know, other than English, please drop them in here with a literal translation into English of said idiom.
Edit: languages are always in flux so it can be hard to find these similarities. One of my favorite examples is that the German word for any animal is "Tier" but the English world is animal, an obviously Latinate word. However, deer sounds a lot like Tier and wouldn't you know it, the ancient Anglo-Saxons called all animals deer.
English is a faster moving and highly dynamic language whereas German is more static and conservative.
German is full of words which are obviously cognates with the King James Bible Germans call pigs Schwein which sounds a lot like Swine. Same for the sky, Germans say Himmel and in older versions of English we called the sky "the Heavens." German is basically like 17th century English in many ways. The examples go on and on.
But yeah, solving these puzzles is even more fun to me than Economics, TBH.
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