I'm Frankie, I play TTRPGs too much. I will be reblogging and/or posting a lot of furry arte and some of that's going to be kink stuff so heads up
AKA Nerts but that's going back a while


hthrflwrs
@hthrflwrs
  • The words "vaccine" and "buckaroo" share a root word! The Latin "vacca," meaning "cow"!! This is because the first vaccine was derived from cowpox, and buckaroo comes from spanish "vaquero," meaning "cowboy"!
  • The state of New Mexico was NOT named after the country of Mexico, and in fact was named that several centuries EARLIER than the country!! (New Mexico has been called that since 1560s, while Mexico only gained that name in the 1820s.) Both of them are named after the Valley of Mexico, which is the location of modern-day Mexico City! At the time of New Mexico's naming, the location of modern-day Mexico was called New Spain!
  • Speaking of state names, California was likely named after a fictional location in a 16th-century Spanish romance novel! In Las Sergas de Esplandián, there's a fictional island named California, named after its ruler, Queen Calafia (whose name possibly comes from the Arabic word "khalif")!!
  • Nobody knows where the word "dog" comes from.

onza
@onza

Word for "dog"
Mbabaram is famous in linguistic circles for a striking coincidence in its vocabulary. When Dixon finally managed to meet Bennett, he began his study of the language by eliciting a few basic nouns; among the first of these was the word for "dog". Bennett supplied the Mbabaram translation, dog. Dixon suspected that Bennett had not understood the question, or that Bennett's knowledge of Mbabaram had been tainted by decades of using English. But it turned out that the Mbabaram word for "dog" was in fact dúg,[2] pronounced almost identically to the Australian English word (compare true cognates such as Yidiny gudaga, Dyirbal guda, Djabugay gurraa and Guugu Yimidhirr gudaa, for example[3]). The similarity is a complete coincidence: there is no discernible relationship between English and Mbabaram. This and other false cognates have been cited by typological linguist Bernard Comrie as a caution against deciding that languages are related based on a small number of lexical comparisons.[4]


dogs is dogs


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in reply to @hthrflwrs's post:

the dog thing is extremely interesting to me because it's apparently also the case for Polish, where any research also gives me only "so here are possible etymologies but there is no consensus", despite the Polish word for dog - "pies" - having seemingly nothing in common with the English equivalent

Fun fact about "dog" as the word for the domesticated canine: the Mbabaram language (Australian Aboriginal language from the northeast of the continent) has the word "dúg" for that animal, pronounced almost exactly like the Australian English pronunciation of "dog". This was very confusing for linguists for a bit, who thought it might have been borrowed from English.