Carbon dioxide posted:

Nessus posted:

By shedding this, English has freed itself of the burden of Proto Indo European, is what I’m getting here.

Alhazred posted:

A fun historical fact: There's historical finds that suggest that Scandinavia were the victims of a bronze embargo during the bronze age that lasted for centuries. The ones responsible for it was the unetice culture who rose to prominens in 2200 BC. They had pretty much a monopoly on bronze trade and while the rest of Europe received plenty of bronze during that period, Scandinavia for some reason didn't. There's even been found flint daggers in Denmark made to resemble bronze daggers:

3D Megadoodoo posted:

They absolutely had a /v/ phoneme. You just don't know what a phoneme is. Anyway, they pronounced it as an approximant. (Most variants of English don't have it, which is why you see a lot of "THEY PRONOUNCED IT LINE WENI WIDI WICI GUISE!!!!11111elvatolvakatinkorva" poo poo on the Internet.)

Woolie Wool posted:

Plenty of other sources specify /w/ pretty exactly, which makes sense for a language that did not strongly differentiate V from U. If you are to think of "ueni, uidi, uici" then the /w/ sound is the pretty obvious pronunciation.

Tenebrais posted:

In fact, the letter F was in the first Greek alphabet as Wau, and pronounced /w/. It fell off due to most ancient Greek dialects not really using the sound but not before making it into Etruscan, where it did the /v/ shift and became the letter F in roman. And then later, the roman letter V split into U, V and W depending on which variation of the sound you were actually making.

the holy poopacy posted:

By the fall of the western empire Romans were already making fun of Iberians for pronouncing it as /b/, which suggests that the common pronunciation wasn't far off by that point.

Fake Name posted:

Digging this up from the last page because now I want to know if there are ancient books of bad puns

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

That's meant to be Kaiser Wilhelm (although he looks more like Hitler than Hitler himself does). Franz Ferdinand is the tiny figure in the car.

SerthVarnee posted:

My great granddad was this guy



He proved something that today sounds really loving obvious.
He proved statistically that prices actually ebb and flow due to societal changes, inflation and so forth and NOT as previously assumed "randomly and explosively".
This didn't really catch on at the time though, much to his frustration, because he had written it in Danish which, not being one of the three primary western world languages at the time, meant that he may as well not have bothered writing it in the first place.

His name was Edvard Philip Mackeprang and his dissertation "Pristeorier" (1906) made him the world's first econometrician.

Carbon dioxide posted:

There were prestigious German chemistry textbooks until the 1980s or so, when everyone switched to English.

venus de lmao posted:

A lot of linguistics terminology is still German, like Urheimat, Sprachraum, ablaut, umlaut, abstand and ausbau language, etc

There's also "loanword", a word borrowed from a foreign language. "Loanword" itself is not a loanword, but a calque, a verbatim translation of the German Lehnwort.

"Loanword" is a calque and "calque" is a loanword, which I quite like.

soviet elsa posted:

Every language vaguely adjacent to you boring vikings has it. Great famous WW2 events like the siege of Lenin's Garden, and Fence of Steel Joe.

Offler posted:

According to wiktionary it's from:

So it's the same root as English "guard"

Nessus posted:

The nitpicking pedant immortalized the guy's name.

My favorite story in this vein was the guy who was asked at Ellis Island, "NAME? FIRST AND LAST" and stammered out "I don't remember" - but in Yiddish, so "shoyn vergessen."

He was thus duly notarized as new American immigrant Sean Ferguson.

Nessus posted:

My understanding is that Ellis Island sucked poo poo, but in many cases it beat the alternative

Brawnfire posted:

You might have to be processed in BOSTON

Trabant posted:

Being a Slavic immigrant to the US myself, instead of giving my actual, complicated name at restaurants and such, I give the more manageable, shares-a-few-letters "Boris." It's a transactional event, so why bother.

What's funny is that it then becomes misheard as Morris.

InediblePenguin posted:

my dad's family probably emigrated in the 19th century but didn't anglicize their names, or stop speaking german at home, until wwii. even then only one side of the family did it and they did it specifically to break up with the other side of the family who were german-american bund nazi supporters. hell yeah pennsylvania

(i don't actually have the right to talk poo poo on pennsylvania, i never lived there myself)

Nessus posted:

Is this a case where there are multiple valid readings of the same Cyrillic name, aka the Gaddafi Effect?

InediblePenguin posted:

lehigh valley? that's where the surviving relatives live now anyway. i don't know if that's where they lived previously actually

HopperUK posted:

Yeah, spelling in the Tudor / Elizabethan period in England was 'just do your best with how it sounds to you'. Seeing which words poets of the time apparently thought rhymed with each other is part of how linguists reconstruct the accent of the time, if I understand correctly.

zedprime posted:

Oh, like a dog dacha?

Soul Dentist posted: