|
Not going to lie, I always wondered why the word for "throwing somebody through a window" was "defenestrate." Now I know!
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 18:14
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 28, 2024 01:10 |
|
|
Fun fact about the Pony Express, it only was in business for half a year before being replaced by telegraph.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 18:15
|
|
|
steinrokkan posted:Fun fact about the Pony Express, it only was in business for half a year before being replaced by telegraph. Obviously I know that since I'm classically educated. (I.e. read Astérix, Lucky Luke, and Tintin as a kid.)
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 18:19
|
|
|
Jerry Cotton posted:Obviously I know that since I'm classically educated. (I.e. read Astérix, Lucky Luke, and Tintin as a kid.) It was pretty cool how some Lucky Luke albums had history articles on the last page (often pointing out the artistic liberties in the comic)
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 18:32
|
|
|
Jerry Cotton posted:Obviously I know that since I'm classically educated. (I.e. read Astérix, Lucky Luke, and Tintin as a kid.) Fun fact: Julius Caesar was only Ceasar for two years, therefore all of the Asterix books take place at a loving breakneck pace
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 18:34
|
|
|
Red Bones posted:Non-postal service related fact: English uses the word "window" instead of a word derived from the latin word for window, fenestra, that romance (ie. Frech "fenetre") and a lot of germanic (ie. German "Fenster") languages in Europe use. In Germanic languages, fenestra entered the languages as a term for glazed windows in the late middle ages - windows are seen in 1st century AD Roman Egypt but northern Europe is, as we all know, a cultural backwater. And in the Scandinavian languages, a good example of where Low German was influential: vindue in Danish, vindu in Norwegian and fönster in Swedish.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 18:36
|
|
|
Incidentally, that's why English is such a loving mess. It's a Germanic language that also has influence from the Celtic and Nordic languages but also from Latin. Basically everybody was conquering the Isles repeatedly throughout history. Then it was left to its own devices when the English nobility decided to speak French because lol gently caress that dirty peasant speak. A few centuries later this weird mish mash of languages then decided that it wanted to be a Romance language like all the cool kid languages the other empires used so they tried to smush that square peg into the round hole. Despite the madness that led to the wreck that it is now it's still fundamentally a Germanic language and follows those rules. A lot of the "rules" you were taught in grammar classes were actually the rules of Latin which does some things differently than the Germanic languages do.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 18:47
|
|
|
Gravitas Shortfall posted:Fun fact: Julius Caesar was only Ceasar for two years, therefore all of the Asterix books take place at a loving breakneck pace And the guy still found the time to invent a salad.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 18:49
|
|
|
ToxicSlurpee posted:Incidentally, that's why English is such a loving mess. It's a Germanic language that also has influence from the Celtic and Nordic languages but also from Latin. Basically everybody was conquering the Isles repeatedly throughout history. Then it was left to its own devices when the English nobility decided to speak French because lol gently caress that dirty peasant speak. A few centuries later this weird mish mash of languages then decided that it wanted to be a Romance language like all the cool kid languages the other empires used so they tried to smush that square peg into the round hole. James Nicoll posted:The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 19:06
|
|
|
English is so loving metal
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 19:14
|
|
|
Jerry Cotton posted:Obviously I know that since I'm classically educated. (I.e. read Astérix, Lucky Luke, and Tintin as a kid.)  But when Caesar tells the story it looks a bit different: 
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 20:06
|
|
|
chitoryu12 posted:I travel a lot and there are parts of the country where there really is nothing out there. Miles and miles of highway with occasional small turn-offs leading to some distant farmhouse that you can barely see, and out west in places like Utah and Nevada you don't even have those. Or cell service! Hence why the electoral college is a terrible idea these days
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 20:15
|
|
|
drrockso20 posted:Hence why the electoral college is a terrible idea these days It always was. Its raison d'être is to disproportionately favor landowners
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 20:20
|
|
|
ToxicSlurpee posted:Despite the madness that led to the wreck that it is now it's still fundamentally a Germanic language and follows those rules. A lot of the "rules" you were taught in grammar classes were actually the rules of Latin which does some things differently than the Germanic languages do. Ending a sentence with a preposition is the sort of foolishness up with which I will not put.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 20:42
|
|
|
English is really not more of a wreck than other languages. Places besides England actually got conquered sometimes, weird I know. Anglos love to think it is a Very Special Language though
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 21:18
|
|
|
History Of English is my go-to bedtime podcast. I highly recommend it.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 21:22
|
|
|
English was invented by printing companies in order to sell dictionaries.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 22:16
|
|
|
Suspect Bucket posted:I think I may have spoken about this before, but one of my favorite window facts is about Witch Windows. In Vermont, older homes sometimes have a window installed on the diagonal. This is apparently because people believed it would keep witches out, as it's very difficult to fly on a broom at an angle. Although that very wikipedia page gives a really interesting alternative explanation: dormers (the little outcroppings on a sloping roof where vertical windows are placed) cause heat loss in cold climates like Vermont, so when someone in Vermont would put an extension on the side of their house, they'd just squeeze a diagonal window between the roofline of the old house and the roofline of the extension to avoid needing to buy a custom-fitted window. Edgar Allen Ho posted:English is really not more of a wreck than other languages. Places besides England actually got conquered sometimes, weird I know. I wrote a thesis on British colonialism, and England getting conquered all the time ended up being a sort of justification for why they were now conquering everywhere else, because they were a powerful conquering Anglo-Saxon race whose history just proved that superior races conquering inferior ones was the nature of the world, and ergo it was a-ok to murder the Irish. It's interesting to compare it to the anti-immigration discourse of European countries (including the UK) in the present day, where instead the argument is that these European cultures should not be displaced by people coming from somewhere else, and that this is 'where we come from'. Indigeneity is now the cultural attribute being constructed in some ways, rather than like, virile conquering superiority.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 22:23
|
|
|
Gravitas Shortfall posted:Fun fact: Julius Caesar was only Ceasar for two years, therefore all of the Asterix books take place at a loving breakneck pace Is this a joke? Caesar was his name not his title, his estate became a title as a kind of work-around to Roman inheritance after the establishment of the empire
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 22:39
|
|
|
Edgar Allen Ho posted:English is really not more of a wreck than other languages. Places besides England actually got conquered sometimes, weird I know. Yeah, growing up I heard all sorts of stuff about how English is uniquely weird/difficult because of [the number of irregular verbs it has/the amount of vocabulary and sometimes grammar it steals from other languages/the total shitshow that is English orthography/the number of accents/dialects it has], and...none of that is true. Ok, the bit about the orthography is, but even there it's far from the worst language out there, and as for the rest it's not noticeably worse than other indo-european languages. We don't even have grammatical gender, and our verb inflection is extremely forgiving! People who learned English as a second language tend to complain about how hard it is, but that's true of just about any second language; if you talk to someone who has learned several extra languages of which English is one, it's basically never the one they complain about the most. You know what does make English weird, though? The way we use "to do". Constructs like "yes, I do like waffles" or "I do not have the grapefruit" don't show up in any other Germanic language! We didn't pick it up from Latin or the Romance languages, either. And while it becomes more pronounced as you go back in time -- "I do like cats" is a rare and awkward-sounding construct in present-day English, but is normal in early modern -- if you go back to Old English it vanishes completely. Fortunately, unlike lots of things in historical linguistics, it's actually pretty easy to figure out where English got this from, because of the thousands of languages spoken in the world, only a tiny handful apart from English use do this way: Welsh and its closest relatives.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 22:51
|
|
|
Former DILF posted:Is this a joke? Caesar was his name not his title, his estate became a title as a kind of work-around to Roman inheritance after the establishment of the empire And is also where we get the words czar, tsar, and kaiser. As for Asterix, we can make some guesses. It starts shortly after the end of the Gallic Wars, so 50BCE at the earliest. Asterix and Cleopatra must be set in 48B or so, since Caesar is in Egypt but not yet romantically involved with Cleopatra. Asterix and Son, 20 books later, must be set in 47 or early 46, given how old Caesarion is. And of course Caesar is assassinated in 44. So, that gives us a span of five years, tops, for all 30-odd books.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 23:09
|
|
|
ToxicFrog posted:And is also where we get the words czar, tsar, and kaiser. What about the one where UFO Mickey Mouse and UFO Arnold Schwarzenegger Superman duke it out?
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 23:11
|
|
|
ToxicFrog posted:And is also where we get the words czar, tsar, and kaiser. I thought the books specifically said they took place in 52 BC. Jerry Cotton posted:What about the one where UFO Mickey Mouse and UFO Arnold Schwarzenegger Superman duke it out? Is this the one that's a thinly-veiled diatribe against manga?
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 23:19
|
|
|
TooMuchAbstraction posted:Is this the one that's a thinly-veiled diatribe against manga? I don't quite know what it is, except a bit poo poo 
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 23:22
|
|
|
ToxicFrog posted:And is also where we get the words czar, tsar, and kaiser. In the Aubrey-Maturin series, author Patrick O'Brian crams five or six years worth of sea voyage and character development into six historical months of 1813. For an earlier book, he suggested that its events take place in a notional 1812a and 1812b. What a shame that the Napoleonic Wars did not last another thirty years... (Also he had no idea when he wrote the first few novels that he'd be writing boat fight adventures right up until he died, and these first ones involved some large time skips that could have been used rather more efficiently, if he'd known)
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2019 23:32
|
|
|
ToxicFrog posted:People who learned English as a second language tend to complain about how hard it is, but that's true of just about any second language; Every person's experience is different, obviously, but to me learning English was a loving cakewalk compared to French or Russian. And that's saying something, because Russian is really close to my native 
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 00:00
|
|
|
If English were hard to learn, how the gently caress would the loving Anglos ever manage it? Checkmate, athestits!
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 00:04
|
|
|
Phy posted:In the Aubrey-Maturin series, author Patrick O'Brian crams five or six years worth of sea voyage and character development into six historical months of 1813. For an earlier book, he suggested that its events take place in a notional 1812a and 1812b. What a shame that the Napoleonic Wars did not last another thirty years... I've been meaning to read those books, I've heard that they're pretty good
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 00:05
|
|
|
Jerry Cotton posted:If English were hard to learn, how the gently caress would the loving Anglos ever manage it? Checkmate, athestits! Have you ever talked to an Englishman?
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 00:07
|
|
|
steinrokkan posted:Have you ever talked to an Englishman? Is Yorkshire in England?
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 00:19
|
|
|
Jerry Cotton posted:Is Yorkshire in England? Yes, and the main argument against your point.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 00:22
|
|
|
steinrokkan posted:Have you ever talked to an Englishman? That joke really only works said in French.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 00:23
|
|
|
drrockso20 posted:I've been meaning to read those books, I've heard that they're pretty good What are your feelings towards Sloths being debauched?
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 01:29
|
|
|
Red Bones posted:Although that very wikipedia page gives a really interesting alternative explanation: dormers (the little outcroppings on a sloping roof where vertical windows are placed) cause heat loss in cold climates like Vermont, so when someone in Vermont would put an extension on the side of their house, they'd just squeeze a diagonal window between the roofline of the old house and the roofline of the extension to avoid needing to buy a custom-fitted window. And as a bonus, it keeps witches out. That's also my default response to silly questions for the last few years. No one can argue, because no witches have got in, and I've got a perfect record so far. Suspect Bucket has a new favorite as of 05:20 on Dec 2, 2019 |
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 05:16
|
|
|
Red Bones posted:Although that very wikipedia page gives a really interesting alternative explanation: dormers (the little outcroppings on a sloping roof where vertical windows are placed) cause heat loss in cold climates like Vermont, so when someone in Vermont would put an extension on the side of their house, they'd just squeeze a diagonal window between the roofline of the old house and the roofline of the extension to avoid needing to buy a custom-fitted window. Talking about the etymology of windows, dormers must have been invented in a year when everyone was at war with everyone else. Here's the name for dormers in a few European languages: English - Dormer French - Lucarne Italian - Abbaino German - Dachgaube Dutch - Dakkapel Danish - Kvist Norwegian - Ark Swedish - Takkupa The German and Dutch words are clearly related, but it's all over the place. NFX has a new favorite as of 08:34 on Dec 2, 2019 |
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 07:06
|
|
|
ToxicFrog posted:And is also where we get the words czar, tsar, and kaiser. as far as Caesar's titles, he likely held more titles than any other Roman. I could list them but wikipedia has that covered. The most notable one was his appointment to the Flamen Dialis, a high priest of jupiter that typically serves for life and excludes one from a military and political career. This was stripped from him when Cornelius Sulla expelled the supporters of Gaius Marius and began his purges. Later, after petition by family and friends, the banishment was lifted and Caesar began his military career and soon won the Civic Crown. Caesar had achieved a permanent position in the Senate and proved himself a great leader of men at just 19 years of age.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 07:30
|
|
|
NFX posted:Talking about the etymology of windows, dormers must have been invented in a year when everyone was at war with everyone else. Here's the name for dormers in a few European languages: Swedish very likey share etymology with dutch and german, i think they all basically mean roof dome/outcropping. Wouldn't surprise me if danish is just a shortening to the latter word, dome/cup/kupa/outcropping.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 08:06
|
|
|
Zudgemud posted:Swedish very likey share etymology with dutch and german, i think they all basically mean roof dome/outcropping. Wouldn't surprise me if danish is just a shortening to the latter word, dome/cup/kupa/outcropping. I miswrote, the Danish name is "kvist" (a "kip" is when the ceiling follows the roof and meets in a point). The English "dormer" comes from the word for sleeping (since it was used in sleeping rooms), and it seems to me that the French word is related to light (although that's a pure guess).
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 08:34
|
|
|
Former DILF posted:Caesar had achieved a permanent position in the Senate and proved himself a great leader of men at just 19 years of age. While this is making me feel bad about my place in life at 34, I take solace in the fact that I likely won't be stabbed to death by a bunch of colleagues and my BFF.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 08:48
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 28, 2024 01:10 |
|
|
Government Handjob posted:While this is making me feel bad about my place in life at 34, I take solace in the fact that I likely won't be stabbed to death by a bunch of colleagues and my BFF. Appropriately, while in the province of Hispania he visited a statue of Alexander the Great and Caesar lamented the fact that he was the very same age as the depicted when Alexander conquered most of the known world, and Caesar was just a lowly functionary serving a nation of besotted and delicacy-fattened fools.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 09:04
|
|