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Day: January 13, 2016
What’s your favorite word etymology?
This is NSFW. Kinda. The Greek word for a porn film is tsonta. The word comes from the Venetian word zonta, which is cognate with Italian giunta and English joint. The original meaning of tsonta was the same as Louisianan lagniappe: it’s an extra helping, an extra portion of the merchandise you’re buying, that the […]
What does Felidae mean? How was the term coined?
Felidae is the Family (biology) that cats and great cats belong to. All animal families are formed with the suffix –idae. In this case, –idae is suffixed to the Latin word felis, meaning cat. The –idae suffix is a Latin plural counterpart to Greek –idai (singular –idēs), meaning offspring. In the plural, the –idai suffix […]
Is there any language that uses the Greek Alphabet other than Greek?
Currently, no. Historically, Greek has been used routinely to write other languages, including the Bactrian language (hence Sho (letter) ), Karamanli Turkish, and Albanian. Answered 2016-01-13 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Is-there-any-language-that-uses-the-Greek-Alphabet-other-than-Greek/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Is there a term for borrowings from a language’s own proto-language?
There’s lots of these—Modern Greek from Ancient Greek, Russian from Old Church Slavonic—but I’m not aware of a generic term. In Greek. for example, these are referred to as learnèd loans (λόγιο δάνειο)—but a learned loan in English is a loan from Latin, not Old English. (In fact we do have a term for learned […]
How was the term “utopia” coined, and by whom?
The Sir Thomas More answer is correct. However, the 14th century Byzantine theologian Neophytus Prodromenus independently coined the term in his treatise Against the Latins [Catholics]. In his text, it was a variant of ἀτοπία “un-placed-ness”, which was the Greek word for absurdity, fallacy. Answered 2016-01-13 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/How-was-the-term-utopia-coined-and-by-whom/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]