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1. clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Thursday, 03-Aug-2023 23:18:44 EDT clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛

   The Torpenhow Hill etymology was imitated in the etymology of a city in the Dragaera fantasy novels:

   tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said…

   1. clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Thursday, 03-Aug-2023 23:31:56 EDT clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛

      in reply to

      /via a discussion about the below exchange:

      >>>>> The 'cuttle' in 'cuttlefish comes from the Old English word cudele, meaning 'cuttlefish'

      
      >>>> *sets entire english language on fire*

      >>> Thereby showing that the phenomenon that gave use gems like “PIN number” and “ATM machine” (also known as the self-demonstrating RAS syndrome, i.e. “redundant acronym syndrome syndrome”) is actually age-old 😀.

      >> This is fantastic

      > In french, the very innocent word “aujourd’hui’, (=“today”), litterally means “the day of hui”, “hui” being an old word for “today”. It’s just like we’d say : “todayday”

      > This becomes hilarious when you think it’s pretty common to say “au jour d’aujourd’hui”, which can be translated by “the day of the day of today.”

      > French people really trying hard to live in the present.

      tumblr.com/frapoleng/160124188…

      1. clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Thursday, 03-Aug-2023 23:41:24 EDT clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛

         in reply to

         Chinese does this to itself all the time. Most words are two-syllable, two-character words. Often when you look up the meaning of the first character it literally means the same thing as the two-character word.

         That's because over the course of 2000 years of language evolution, loss of tones and phonemes from Classical Chinese and the addition of new words in the vocabulary, that first syllable has become too ambiguous in the spoken language.

         In an analogy, to tie it back to the top:

         - do you mean cuddle, the act of physical intimacy, or cudele, the sea creature?
         - yeah I meant the cuttle fish
         - ok, got you

         1. lnxw48a1 (lnxw48a1@nu.federati.net)'s status on Friday, 04-Aug-2023 04:18:34 EDT lnxw48a1

            in reply to
            @clacke Do I recall correctly that there's an old Chinese script and a new one? Does this apply to both?
            1. clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Friday, 04-Aug-2023 04:27:08 EDT clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛

               in reply to
               See libranet.de/display/0b6b25a8-1… , there are at least three ways of writing modern Chinese, but either way almost all of your nouns and verbs will have two syllables.
               1. clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Friday, 04-Aug-2023 04:28:35 EDT clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛

                  in reply to
                  (Classical Chinese is a different spoken and written language that is no longer in general use since the 1950s)
         2. clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Friday, 04-Aug-2023 04:10:09 EDT clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛

            in reply to
            The poem "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den" (Chinese: 施氏食獅史; pinyin: Shī-shì shí shī shǐ) was used by *both* sides as an argument for and against replacing Classical Chinese with pinyin (Latin-lettered phonetics) and later also for and against introducing Simplified Chinese writing.