NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

mastodon

email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

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lexi
@lexi

german is such a silly language.

carbon is kohlenstuff, which directly translates to "coal stuff". but carbon fiber is not "kohlenstofffaser", but "karbonfaser". so "karbon-" exists in german, but carbon is not "karbon", its "kohlenstoff".

acid is also funny: its säure. that just means "[something that is] sour".

even better is carbonated, which is "kohlensäurehaltig". that directly translates to "coal acid holding". carbonated water is "sprudel" though, which means surge/whirl.

and you're never gonna guess what oxygen is: it's sauerstoff, or translated "sour stuff".


blep
@blep
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NireBryce
@NireBryce

and d ont even get me started on grammatical gender


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in reply to @lexi's post:

I guess “karbonfaser” was a partial calque lol

“sauerstoff” also makes some sense as a calque, “oxygen” itself means “acid maker”, because Lavoisier thought that all acids contained oxygen. Hydrogen and nitrogen were also named by French chemists within a couple decades of this.

Also Swedish: sur=sour, syre=oxygen, syra=acid.

And Finnish: hapan=sour, happi=oxygen, happo=acid;
hiili=coal/charcoal/carbon, puu=wood/tree, puuhiili=charcoal, kivi=stone/rock, kivihiili=coal;
hiilihapotettu=carbonated.

Estonian: hapu=sour, hapnik=oxygen, hape=acid.

Russian: kislyy=sour, kislorod=oxygen, kislota=acid.

I get everything you're saying about carbon, and I love how inconsistent it is. But you can't complain that the German for acid is just "[a] sour [thing]" when acid in English is literally just dropping the us from the end of the Latin word for "sour".

in reply to @blep's post:

i mean maybe it is just me but i think versuchen makes sense? in toki pona versuchen and suchen are the same word, alasa, which most basically means 'to hunt' but from there gets the sense of 'to look for' and then from there 'to look to do', because instead of hunting an object you're hunting a... state in the future i guess? with all of the same implicit 'this is the thing that is intended but the actual outcome is uncertain'. i dunno it's hard to explain but it makes sense i think, and i get why you would distinguish between the two with a sorta twisty prefix

verhalten is extremely weird though, i have no explanation for that

To be fair, rhinoceros and Nashorn mean the exact same thing. Turns out you can have however many characteristics such as stompy feet, sturdy textured skin, cute AF lil ears and tail - if you have a nose horn, people will call you nose horn. It's maybe a little bit weirder to just call them rhinos, anyway.

so they have words for...seemingly carbon dioxide? and carboxylic acid...but not carbonic acid? or do they have the same problem we do and often call the acid created by dissolving carbon dioxide in water carbonic acid when it isn't really.

ver- as a prefix absolutely sounds like something i would have twisted myself into a pretzel attempting to write a paper about in college if i knew it existed

as it was i broke my brain attempting to write about russian verbs of motion instead

in reply to @NireBryce's post: