Moderator:Forum Administrators
Now that you’ve done all the research, you really should make the revisions!
vijayjohn wrote:The word for 'dictionary' in several languages comes from the Arabic word قاموس qāmūs. Apparently, in Arabic, this word originally meant 'ocean' and was borrowed from Ancient Greek ωκεανός okeanós, but the most comprehensive Arabic dictionary for nearly five centuries was (has been?) القاموس المحيط Al-Qāmus al-Muḥīṭ 'The Surrounding Ocean', and قاموس came to mean 'dictionary' rather than 'ocean'.
linguoboy wrote:vijayjohn wrote:The word for 'dictionary' in several languages comes from the Arabic word قاموس qāmūs. Apparently, in Arabic, this word originally meant 'ocean' and was borrowed from Ancient Greek ωκεανός okeanós, but the most comprehensive Arabic dictionary for nearly five centuries was (has been?) القاموس المحيط Al-Qāmus al-Muḥīṭ 'The Surrounding Ocean', and قاموس came to mean 'dictionary' rather than 'ocean'.
Huh. One of the most comprehensive Chinese dictionaries produced in the 20th century is named 辞海 or "word-sea". I wonder if there's any chance of a semantic loan or if it's just an obvious enough metaphor that it was hit upon completely independently.
Naava wrote:Those words reminded me also of näykkiä and näykätä ("to nibble", the former describing a repeated action and the latter an action that happened only once). I couldn't find any etymology for either word in Wiktionary. Would you be able to find anything about them online, Linguaphile?
It took me a minute to figure out how this word said /ts/ in the middle and not /ss/ until I remembered that written /s/ is /t/ at the end of a syllable in Thai. I wonder if it's spelled with the same letter twice to mimic the <zz> in the middle. If so that's a neat trick.linguoboy wrote:พิซซ่า, a Thai adaptation of the word "pizza", is slang for the crime of lèse majesté in Thailand. Section 112 is the part of the penal code which covers this crime and 1112 is the telephone number for a restaurant called The Pizza Company. (The Thai government has been known to apply this statute very draconianly so it doesn't surprise me that people would need a coded euphemism in order to avoid falling afoul of it.)
Return to “General Language Forum”
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 5 guests