Today I got to tell a student that Appalachian English is a real and valid thing, after she shyly tried explaining her family’s dialect as “hillbilly English.” She told me she had never known there was a word for it.
Ya’ll, this is why teaching linguistic diversity matters.
Older forms of English kept Latin’s gender-specific suffixes -tor and -trix; tor is for men and trix is for women. So a male pilot is an aviator, a female pilot is an aviatrix. A male fighter is a gladiator, a female fighter is a gladiatrix.
This contrasts with the modern system, where tor is for both men and women, and trix are for kids.
Soooo since I’ve been learning Welsh for a while I thought about making a list to share a few resources to learn Celtic languages! (I’ll keep updating this post!)
i’ll never understand why we don’t call countries the names they actually call themselves
like, i know this is a weeaboo-sounding example, but let’s start with Japan. They call themselves Nippon or Nihon depending on… i guess, the speaker’s accent??? or their level of formality while speaking??? I dunno. But we still called them Zipangu for like a few hundred years. And now we call them Japan.
All because Marco Polo asked someone in China about that island over there and they said “oh that’s Cipangu” and Marco Polo was like “Oh, Zipangu, cool.” And then he went back to Italy and said “Y’ALL THERE’S THIS DOPE-ASS ISLAND CALLED ZIPANGU” and people back in Italy were like “An island called Giappone? Dope.”
And this pattern of people mishearing people kept repeating until we got to “Japan.”
And we still call them Japan even though we know better. Because fuck you, Marco Polo asked the wrong person 500 years ago and misheard them and we’re sticking to that, I guess.
that was literally just the world’s worst game of telephone
I don’t know the exact etymological origins of Easter, nor what Eostre is exactly. All I can tell you is that anyone who uses “Eostre” as evidence that Easter is a pagan tradition is a charlatan; if you look at the word for the holiday in basically any other language, it is a variation of Passover/Pesach.
A lot of these loose connections between Christian terms and “pagan” terms are actually very English centric
You can only make a haphazard connection between the word Eoster and the Christian celebration of Easter if you are thinking in the context of the English language.
Here’s how you say Easter in various other languages:
Spanish: Pascua
Portuguese: Páscoa
French: Pâques
Italian: Pasqua
Romanian: Pasti
Greek: Paskha
Danish: Paaske
Russian: Paskha
In most, if not all of these cases, the word for Easter doubles as the word for the Jewish Passover. So for a good part of the Christian word, the word for Easter is completely unrelated to this “Eostre.” In some countries, it’s simply called “Resurrection Festival.”
This sort of reminds me of a claim from that Zeitgeist movie, about how supposedly the term “Son of God” came from the phrase “Sun of God” somehow indicating that Christianity was derived from pagan sun worship. But again, this is a very ignorant and English centric claim, because it assumes that the words “son” and “sun” sound the same in every language on earth.
By the way, if you find movies like the Zeigeist as painfully annoying as I do, here’s a good article on the inaccuracies presented in the movie.
Plus. Eostre is a Germanic word, from Central Europe, and Christianity first took root in the Middle East and Mediterranean. So yeah, anyone who makes that claim is ignorant of both etymology and history.
Please, please, please whenever you see a person who can’t speak English do not criticise them because of this. Look, learning English for a non-Indo-European language speaker, is hard. Think of Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, Turkish, Zulu, Thai, Swahili, Chinese and Arabic people and the others. It’s no like a German native learning French, or an English native learning Spanish. Think of a completely different structure, strange vowels, and foreign idioms. Think of a massive amount of cultural diversity, think of us. So, please, whenever you see someone whose native is a minority language, but speaks English anyway, appreciate them. Tell them this is an amazing success and try to help them to get better. Please.
Wide Spread Interests 