@stargazer1682

10 months ago

All. The. Time. Not just that, but like the etymology or history of where a word came from and how it evolved over time. Because like, the name "Diane" didn't start as "Diane". There are a couple of roots for the name I found in a quick search. There's the French "denu," which means Valley. There's also the word "divinus" meaning divine (which seems accurate...). The name "Darla" means "dear one" - which I only know because of the Buffy spin-off Angel. But you can kind of see how "dear one" and "Darla" could be connected through the word "darling". Just those facts in general goes to show that giving babies unusual or less conventional names isn't new. People have been naming their babies "divine" for so long, society has forgotten past versions of the word, but still perpetuates some version of them, because they've become socially acceptable as names. Some Christians might know that "Jesus" would is the ancient version of "Joshua," but there was no "J" sound in that culture at the time. His name would have been pronounced "Yesh-owa" - and over thousands of years it's became "Cheese-us" or "Jays-us" to the celts 😉. Which is the craziest part, because pronunciations of words and their meanings keep changing; but then people forget where those words came from, what they originally meant or how they were pronounced. There's a really interesting video on youtube talking about performing Shakespeare using the period specific pronunciations of words; and how that can change some of the context of what he wrote. Some of the lines suddenly rhyme that don't rhyme now, but would have when he wrote it. There are lines that become puns, that are conventionally delivered now dramatically and with seriousness. By some account, the US Southern accent - like, the Appalachian accent - is said to be closer to the Old English accent - like 17th/18th century English. A couple of my favorites that I learned about in this book I read about the Dutch colony of what is now Manhattan. The reason American have "cookies" instead of "biscuits," is because of the Dutch word, "koekje" - pronounced along the lines of "kook-yez" - means "little cakes". The Dutch word "koolsla" literally means "cabbage salad," which gives us "coleslaw"

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