Subscribe to Blog via Email
Archive:
Day: July 21, 2016
Does the word Medical have any relation with the Medes people?
At first, I thought “oh come on!” Then I thought “hey, I should check.” Now I think “probably not, but it was worth checking”. medical comes ultimately from Latin mederi “to heal, give medical attention to, cure”: Online Etymology Dictionary. In turn, this ultimately derives from the Indo-European stem *med– (Pokorny’s dictionary), “to measure; to […]
Do languages other than English have a numerical concept similar to “dozens”, plural?
Modern Greek has borrowed duzina from Venetian, so that does get used. What is more idiomatic is the suffix –arja added on to tens-words, meaning “approximately”. So ðekarja “around ten”, triantarja “around thirty, thirty-odd”, eksindarja “around sixty, sixty-odd”. [EDIT: correction to hundreds] Also ðjakosarja “two hundred-odd”, triakosarja “three hundred odd”, up to enjakosarja “nine hundred-odd”; […]