Date: Thu, 23 May 2002 16:18:54 +0930 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> Cc: cjc26@cornell.edu, Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Sanskrit numbers (was: French, Flemish and English (was: cvs commit: src/sys/alpha/alpha clock.c)) Message-ID: <20020523161854.J230@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <20020523062640.GB237@lpt.ens.fr> References: <20020522192335.P47352@lpt.ens.fr> <Pine.SOL.3.91.1020522160649.23407A-100000@travelers.mail.cornell.edu> <20020522215236.GA1640@lpt.ens.fr> <20020523144550.C230@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20020523062640.GB237@lpt.ens.fr>
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On Thursday, 23 May 2002 at 8:26:40 +0200, Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > Greg 'groggy' Lehey said on May 23, 2002 at 14:45:50: >>> That's pretty interesting, and much more believable than the >>> reconstruction of sounds... but not *entirely* believable. The >>> words for "chicken" or "iron" could have changed for some relatively >>> minor reason -- compare "iron" and "steel" in English, whose >>> distinction is not terribly important in practice. >> >> Indeed. I note that in some Aryan language (Hindi?), a word for goose >> is "Hans". In Iranian, it's "Ghans", and in German it's "Gans". This >> suggests that geese were known in PIE times, so why not chickens? > > "Hansa" in Sanskrit/Hindi means swan, not (afaik) goose, but perhaps > close enough. Yes, I suppose so. What's "goose"? I have a (very good) Indian goose recipe which has been called "Khubab Hans", though I don't know what language that is. > (On that topic, what does "Lufthansa" mean? Given that the emblem > is a flying swan, many in India think it means "flying swan" but I'm > told there's no such word in German.) Well, of course there's a word for flying swan: fliegender Schwan. To quote the OED, the Hansa (English Hanse) was "The name of a famous political and commercial league of Germanic towns". "Luft" means "air", so "Lufthansa" is something like "air league". I don't know what the bird is supposed to be. The Hanse was mainly a maritime organization, and it was spread round the North Sea and Baltic Sea, with connections in London. Until recently, the prevailing view was that the English word "Sterling" referred to the "Easterlings" of the Hanse, but the OED considers this to be incorrect. Still, it shows the importance of the Hanse that people should have thought so. The Hanse isn't dead; four famous towns (Bremen, Hamburg, Lübeck and Rostock) still claim to be part of the Hanse, and Bremen and Hamburg are still city-states within the German Federation. Greg -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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