Oh, thatâs just ridiculous⊠
(About the professor getting suspended I mean. I hadnât heard about it.)
I mean, couldnât they have asked any random Chinese speaker before suspending him? Somehow theyâve managed to take something confusing and make it into something actually offensive.
What if someone from this country will be asked âWhere are you from?â ?
Or what if my buddy whose last name is Heiniger gets stopped by the police there?
Itâs also reminiscent of that problem with the profanity filter on the main site filtering the Spanish word negro, making it pretty impossible to talk about which colour you were playing in Spanish.
Letâs get this thread active again with a discussion of historical linguistics. What was the world of language like in, say, the year 1400 CE?
once I realised how much Iâd bit off, I was too far in
Celtic languages had taken a severe hit during the Roman domination of Europe, being almost expunged from the continental landmass, in which they had once been very widespread. However, Middle Breton was still being spoken as a low-status language in, obviously, Britanny. In England, also, Common Brittonic had long since been replaced, first partially by Latin and then by Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons. Instead of going extinct, though, it had evolved into a number of daughter languages. In Cornwall, Middle Cornish was spoken but was apparently already in decline. In Wales, Early Modern Welsh was in use; and the people of the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea spoke in Manx. There was a fairly large speakership of Scots Gaelic in northwest Scotland, and Early Modern Irish was thriving in Ireland.
Old English, under the oppression of a Francophone elite, had evolved into Middle English and the related languages (or dialects) of Early Scots in Scotland and Yola in Ireland. In scope it was a lesser language than its Germanic cousin Old Norse, which spanned a large area containing Denmark, Scandinavia and Iceland. Middle Dutch dialects were being spoken in the Netherlands, Old Frisian around Belgium and, to the east, Early New High German and other German languages.
Around the beginning of the Medieval period, ca. 700 CE or so, Latin ceased to be a spoken language in most situations and split into many languages and dialects spread throughout Europe and even Africa. The most northerly of the Romance languages, or language groups, was French, which was then much more diverse. Anglo-Norman was, as stated, the language of Englandâs ruling class, but Norman languages such as JĂšrriais were also spoken on the Channel Islands. In Northern France other languages of the same OĂŻl group dominated, such as Picard, Walloon, and Middle French itself. In southern France, meanwhile, Occitan was spoken.
On the Iberian peninsula Old Spanish was transitioning into Middle Spanish, alongside Old Portuguese and Catalan. In Italy, of course, various dialects of Italian were spoken, as well as the more distantly-related Sicilian on Sicily. In the eastern Mediterranean, Medieval Greek persisted in the Byzantine Empire, preserving one of the worldâs oldest and most productive literary traditions, that would soon kickstart the Renaissance. Old Hungarian and Basque continued to the odd men out of European linguistics. Yiddish would also have been heard in Europe at this time. Romani was not yet attested and may not have entered the continent. In the east were Slavic languages, most obviously Russian and Old Polish, with Church Slavonic being an important literary language.
The most southerly Romance language was perhaps the mysterious African Romance, but this may have already become extinct. The dominant language of Mediterranean Africa was Arabic, a relative newcomer to the region; a descendant language, Maltese, existed on Malta. It existed alongside the incumbent Berber languages, such as Tifinagh, which were also spoken on the Canary Islands. In Egypt, the native Coptic had already gone extinct and would not be revived until the 19th century (and even then, only in liturgical use). Amharic was spoken in Ethiopia. In Subsaharan Africa a wide variety of languages were, and still are, spoken, most notably from the Khoisan, Nilo-Saharan, and Niger-Congo groups (which includes the Bantu languages). Likely Swahili, a Bantu language, was already being used as a lingua franca in East Africa. Malagasy, the language of Madagascar, is an Austronesian language unrelated to any other on the continent.
Travelling east, now, in addition to the continued presence of Arabic we find Syriac and other Aramaic languages being spoken in the Middle East, as well as Persian dialects. Turkic languages spread from Anatolia deep into Central Asia, with Ottoman Turkish becoming the administrative language of the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman Turkish was heavily imbued with Persian and Arabic loanwords, which comprised most of its vocabulary.
In northern India Hindi was, as today, dominant â the Persianised dialect Urdu did not yet exist. Starting in the 13th century Sanskrit had heavily declined and was possibly extinct as a conversational tongue; Pali continued its role as the language of Buddhist literature. Prakrits derived from Sanskrit such as Bengali and Marathi were also spoken at this time. Modern Tamil, an unrelated language, was widespread in South India and Sri Lanka.
Further east still, Modern Mongolian was already being spoken, with no clear relation to its linguistic neighbours. Passing the steppes, we enter the Far East or Orient proper, where we encounter Tibetan, Cantonese, and Mandarin; Hokkien seems not to yet exist. In South East Asia there existed Ancient Vietnamese, Middle Khmer, and Old Burmese, as well as Malay. It is impossible to say what exact languages were spoken on the Pacific islands, including New Zealand, except that they were of the Austronesian group. In Australia there were a wide variety of aboriginal languages; in the modern day, this diversity is heavily skewed towards the north of Australia, with much of the landmass dominated by the Pama-Nyungan group.
Pre-Columbian America had a large number of indigenous languages. In the Arctic, Inuit languages were prevalent; further south, the Algonquian languages such as Ojibwe and Cree. The dominant language of Mesoamerica was Nahuatl, speech of the Aztecs and related peoples, which coexisted with the Mayan languages. TaĂno was the common tongue ot the Caribbean. Now to sneak away before anyone notices I left out the mess that is the languages of South AmericaâŠ
Letâs talk about travelling verbs.
The Japanese words are probably pretty inaccurate, I never even studied verbs much when I was learning Japanese.
| English | Latin | Japanese |
|---|---|---|
| walk | ambulĂł* | æ©ă |
| march | inferĂł* | èĄéČ |
| run | cursĂł* | è”°ă |
| swim | natĂł | æłłă |
| climb | scandĂł* | äžă |
| ride | uexĂ* | weirdly, couldnât find this |
| sail | nĂĄuigĂł | èȘæ”· |
| row | rĂ©migĂł | æŒă |
| drive | äžè”°ă | |
| cycle | ă”ă€ăŻăȘăłă° |
- root of amble
- root of cursor
- eventual root of ascend
- passive form of ueho, âcarryâ, so âI am carriedâ
- root of navigate
Challenge: what are some words in your home / target language that start with the same letter as they end?
Here are some examples from Latin:
molybdaenum, molybdenum (New Latin)
mĂșnicipium, town
mĂșrem (abl.), mouse
mĂșrum (abl.), wall
secĂșris, axe
septĂĄns, a seventh
seruus, slave
sextĂĄns, a sixth
silĂșrus, wels catfish
sĂșs, pig
suus, his / her
I think the difficulty with these kind of word - word translations, is that language isnât that simple, words donât align neatly between two languages.
The easiest example directly relevant to this subject are the verbs to go and to come, usually translated in Japanese as èĄă and æ„ă. However, these translations donât align.
For example, the sentence âIâm coming to your houseâ cannot be translated as ăăăȘăăźćź¶ăžæ„ăă, since æ„ă always has the meaning of movement towards the speaker, while èĄă always has the meaning of movement away from the speaker.
Another problem is that Japanese not always uses verbs for what are verbs in English, but instead uses the construction noun + ăă to denominalise (i.e. make verb out of) nouns.
Of your translations, æ©ă could be complimented with æŁæ©ăă, where the first one is more general, but usually is used for travel, and the second is used for walking around recreationally (to stroll or to take a walk)
éă could mean to march, and a compound verb ç·Žăæ©ă could be made. èĄéČ is a noun, on its own, but èĄéČăă would be the way to make a verb out of this noun.
Climbing a mountain is usually written with the kanji ç»ă, but this is only used for getting up the mountain. Going down is éăă, which is also used as a translation of to alight (from a bus, etc.)
Riding a train, bus, horse, bike is translated as äčă, which also means to get on (the opposite of to alight).
Driving a car (as the chauffeur) is éè»ąăă. Riding a bicycle is èȘè»ąè»ăäčă, I donât believe ă”ă€ăŻăȘăłă° can become a verb.
One very common verb that has been missed is ćž°ă, which means to return.
Many verbs of movement can be combined, either by ăŠ-form or by compounding the verbs, for more nuance. For example, if youâre going home, you would use ćž°ă, but once you came home, youâd say ćž°ăŁăŠæ„ă.
French is (in my opinion) horrible with movement verbs.
Almost everything is just aller with is generally âto displace oneself, to goâ. Thereâs marcher âto walkâ, but as soon as youâre using any other means, tu vas Ă pied 
, à vélo 
, Ă cheval 
, en voiture 
. Note how the preposition changes according to whether you are on the vehicle or inside it. Monter is any movement upwards, be it on a mountain or on a horse. You can say je monte Ă cheval and mean âIâm ridingâ, but you canât say âIâm riding into townâ. In that case, you would use aller again, but specify that youâre on a horse.
Similarly, thereâs no easy way to say âI drive into townâ, because you would use aller again.
In German, thereâs Ich fahre den Bus and Ich fahre mit dem Bus. One means youâre the busdriver, the other means youâre a passenger. Once in French class I wanted to write something like âthe girl takes the bus into townâ, which uses fahren in German, but to use conduire in French was out of the question, as that wouud imply sheâs the driver and you canât conduire into something. That was a bit frustrating.
And then thereâs grimper âto climbâ when you have to use arms and legs.
Yesterday I thought about the word âhornyâ.
I always heard it meaning âarousedâ, usually referred to female, and never noticed the root âhornâ in that word.
So yesterday I was asking myself: what have horns to do with horny people?
Does âhornyâ literally mean âprovided with hornsâ or maybe âmade of hornâ or âlooking/feeling like hornâ?
Are we talking about animal horns?
Please, enlighten me! 
Hmm, Iâve never thought of the word as especially referring to women.
I couldnât find the etymology on a quick search, but I can offer three ideas, aka. âfolk etymologiesâ:
-
That it relates to rhino horn, used (or, at least, thought to be used) in powdered form as an aphrodisiac in traditional Chinese medicine
-
Because the erect penis resembles a horn in its shape and relative firmness
-
Referencing the antlers of stags, which they grow in the mating season for sexual competition and display
Speaking of which, I recently stumbled upon this gem here.
I donât think it is, from a linguistic point of view.
Itâs just the way I happened to stumble upon it.
Actually a âhorny manâ is a strong image, depending on where that horn is placed 
.
I think your #2 is the more reasonable.
Now I wonder how such a male related metaphor could have become a gender independent adjective. 
If I mention a âwoman with an erectionâ strange things come to mind. 
maybe it has something to do with Lilith, succubus and other demons with horns on head folklore? And nothing to do with metaphor?
May be.
Iâm asking here because Iâm not English native speaker and since my searches on internet didnât find an etymology.
In Italian âcornutoâ (horned) means âprovided with hornsâ, like a bull or a deer, but has also a romantic/sexual relationship meaning, which is something like âcheated by the partnerâ, âfrequently betrayedâ.
Itâs very far from the English âhornyâ! 
This makes me even more curious about the English term.
Iâm no expert, but I think these characters are not present enough in Anglophone folklore to produce the word âhornyâ.
I have problems distinguishing the sound of âcuckâ and âcockâ but today I learnt a couple words that I didnât know before. Thank you very much!
Iâd like to talk a bit about Indo-European languages and their morphologies.
Today, almost half the people in the world speak an Indo-European language, mainly English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Russian.
This group hasnât always been prominent, though. Throughout early history, the main cultural centre of western Eurasia was in the Middle East, the Levant, North Africa, and Anatolia. Akkadian, Egyptian, and Hebrew, languages of the Afro-Asiatic group, were prominent; as well as language isolates like Sumerian and Elamite; whilst Indo-European languages stayed out of the limelight further north.
There is an exception: Hittite. The earliest-attested I-E language, with records from around 1200-1600 BCE, Hittite had a massive nine grammatical cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, vocative, dative(-locative), ablative, instrumental (of a tool), ergative (of a subject of a verb), and allative (a type of locative). However, it had no gender system and instead differentiated nouns based on their animacy.
Skip forward to the Late Classical period, ca. 300-600 CE. Europe and Western Asia are dominated by four important, basal I-E languages: Gothic, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. They shared a similar, relatively complex morphology. All differentiated between masculine, feminine, and neuter genders. All distinguished between singular and plural; but in Gothic, Greek, and Sanskrit, the dual number was also observed, whereas in Latin it had become vestigial. It would eventually die out in Greek as well. Sanskrit maintained the most cases, eight: nominative, accusative, genitive, vocative, dative, ablative, locative, and instrumental. The others lacked the instrumental and a distinct locative, and had somewhat reduced vocative cases. Greek and Gothic also had no ablative case.
Jump forward again, to the modern day. The major I-E language, English, has no case system at all, with only the âpseudo-genitiveâ 's, relying on its particle words like of, for, and to, and a comparatively strict word order. It has only the remnants of a gender system in its distinction of such words as actor and actress. The dual number has long since been lost, with Scots even reducing its singularâplural divide. Spanish and Portuguese have only two genders, neuter having been subsumed into male, and have only a nominative and âobliqueâ case. The neuter gender is still kept alive in German and Russian, as well as more complex case systems.