Walnuts taste bad, except when you bake them into a bread, which is lovely. Why?
Brilliant Scottish place names: Auchtermuchty.
But does the town of Dollar have anything to do with you know what?
Finnish words that do not translate into English:
Puolituttu - someone you sorta know.
English words that do not translate into Finnish:
Please - vittuileksää?
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8 comments:
I found a relation between a name of a Scottish town and an old Central European currency to be quite unlikely, and decided to go ahead and find it out for you. There seems to be three possible explanations for the name of the town:
1) a derivation of the word dolor, meaning grief, common in many European lanaguages
2) a derivation of doilleir, an Irish and Scots Gaelic work meaning dark and gloomy
3) a derivation from various words in Pictish Gaelic, Dol (field) + Ar (arable) or Dol (valley) + Ar (high)
Go here for some more details. It says there that the name dolair first appears in references to a battle between the Danes and the Scots around 877. The word thaler appeared only in the 15th century.
And oh, the Scots naturally lost that battle.
I was once told that there's no bijection between languages. I think that's brilliantly put. For the not-so-nerdy-ones, replace "bijection" by "one-to-one mapping".
As long as there's Antti, no need to google! I never knew that thaler > dollar. Makes sense though. The town Dollar gets its name from Dollar Glen (valley). Never been, but it's apparently very impressive in a Scottish way, so 'dark and gloomy' sounds likely. I'll tell you when I manage to visit.
Of course Scots lost. But remind me never to let you go into a Scottish pub alone.
I don't understand neither "bijection" nor "one-to-one mapping"?
What about California?
It's my never-ending curiosity. If only I was able to remember half the things I google...
The point is that there's no word to word translation between languages. And I think it's true even for the simplest of sentences. No matter how you translate something, the meaning will always be slightly different.
There are of course simple and obvious examples. A finn might say "Näin auton", which you'd usually translate as "I saw a car". But the finn may just as well have seen a lorry. (Or if you're talking to an American, you'd say the finn saw a truck.) But I think that the observation is not limited to these simple cases.
Yes, what about California. I didn't get this comment.
California.
True about the "bijection" (you science people live in a strange world sometimes). But some words translate better than others.
Okay... I don't usually google on cue (you have to be bit more subtle), but this one was too interesting, because I thought I knew the origins of the name California are in the Americas. It turns out I may be right.
"On May 11th, 1848 a quantity of sixteenth century gold coins was found at the foot of the cliffs at Scratby. A group of Winterton beachmen must have concluded that the cliff above the site of the find would make a good site for a new lookout. At the same time the California gold rush in America was much in the news. The beachmen decided that their new site needed a name – and California, Norfolk came into being."
http://www.fleggisland.co.uk/Villages.html
I didn't make any effort to confirm that this story is actually true, though.
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