Cool things you independently discovered (self.cafe)

submitted 2 years ago by ruk_n_rul to c/cafe

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What things you discovered on your own, that is actually already known and named for a long time? For example, you observe a phenomenon, you write it down, but didn't look it up further for lack of words. Years later, you chance upon the exact same thing on Wikipedia.

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[-] cendawanita 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

This is REALLY silly but that would be me making the absolutely unsurprising connection (to academics) between Russian and Sanskrit because I was trying to learn basic Russian and learning their word for man is basically distant cousins along the language tree to the Malay "manusia".

Anyway out of that I learned that the etymology of punch comes from the Slavic languages' word for five (because five fingers = a whole dang fist) which is of course related to Sanskrit as well and survives in Malay in words like "pancaindera"

Sekian terima kasih.

[-] ruk_n_rul 3 points 2 years ago

Germanic, Greek, Latin, Romance, Slavic, Indic; all these languages ultimately are descendants of an ancestral language linguists call the Proto-Indo-European.

english goose == German gans == sanskrit gansa == malay angsa

[-] cendawanita 2 points 2 years ago

Yup!! For some reason I never situated Russian and Ukrainian in the family tree lmao

this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023

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