Words I learned this week:
The Russian word for one is 'Odin'. Related to the Norse god maybe? I've already pointed out some Norse influence in Russian in their word for lightning, molniya (cf. mjolnir)
The Dutch word for a match is 'Lucifer', which I think is just a brand name that stuck, something we linguists call semantic broadening. The same reason hoover now refers to any vacuum cleaner. There are more examples in American English, such as Coke, Xerox and Kleenex.
No comments:
Post a Comment