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Re: [ontolog-forum] (OT) German

To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Ivan Herman <ivan@xxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2008 11:09:29 +0100
Message-id: <4789E359.9060107@xxxxxx>


John F. Sowa wrote:
[snip]    (01)

> 
> The western European languages, even though they come from different
> language families, such as French, German, Hungarian, and Polish,
> all share a common culture.  Therefore, the vocabularies of those
> languages have become aligned because of many interactions among
> people who have worked (and fought) together for centuries.
> 
> As just one example, Polish and Russian are two closely related
> languages that have many common roots.  But Poland has been more
> closely connected to the west than he east.  As a result, many
> Polish words are aligned with western European languages, even
> though the roots are closer to Russian.
>     (02)

Another interesting example is Hungarian which went through a phase of 
'linguistic renewal' at the beginning of the 18th century, when 
committees created new words in Hungarian to make it usable for more 
modern life (prior to that Hungarian was spoken only by peasants). As 
Hungary was part of the Austrian Monarchy, they took over German words, 
including the German construction like... Nasehorn. So, for example, 
they looked at 'Nase + horn', they translated the words 'Nase' (orr) and 
'horn' (szarv) and they put the two together again to create "orrszarvú" 
to mean... rhinoceros. Hungarian is full of those illogical compound 
words that were literally translated from German...    (03)

Ivan    (04)

--     (05)

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
PGP Key: http://www.ivan-herman.net/pgpkey.html
FOAF: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf.rdf    (06)

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