fun Turkish fact of the day

[kaberett]

I had been remembering the Turkish for red, kırmızı, by associating it with "crimson". Today I finally got around to looking up whether that's a false cognate, and nope, it isn't: they're both from the Arabic qirmiz (i.e. Coccus ilicis, as in the red dye cochineal, i.e. the insect family from which it is prepared), ultimately from Sanskrit.

(Today I have learned a thing about entomology! "But Alex, don't you mean etym--" "No. It's a bug."*)

* If you can remember which web comic it was that I read this joke in recently I'd be very grateful.

Comments

[vass]

I think maybe it was a Tumblr text post, not a comic.

[kaberett]

RIGHT that sounds plausible! Thank you for the pointer <3

[recessional]

It was definitely on tumblr, because I reblogged it.

Can't remember what the fuck it was, but I remember cackling hysterically about it and reblogging it. >.>

[sfred]

Hurray :-)

[korafox]

I think there was an XKCD comic about etymology/entomology, but it was one from quite a while ago.

[kaberett]

It was indeed, and was not the thing I was thinking of -- birke found it, link below!

[alexseanchai]

lol :)

[davidgillon]

The link is even more obvious when you think about carmine as an alternative to crimson.

[kaberett]

Huh, I find "crimson" a much more obvious relative of kırmızı than carmine, but yes!

[davidgillon]

Hmmm, should the 'ı's in kırmızı be read as 'i's or 'l's? I'd read them as 'i's without noticing the missing dot'.

[kaberett]

They're dotless i! They're a character Turkish has that makes a mess of Anglocentric character encodings, because I is capital dotless i, and capital dotted i is a different character again. But yes, okay, with standard English orthography I can see how the dotless i makes it look like it's "carmine" even though it's much more over toward the "uh" end of the phoneme!

[birke]

Here's a link to the Tumblr post: http://pathless-wood.tumblr.com/post/163118868046/bitrandombit-tygenco-delirieuse

[birke]

(So I guess it's actually from Twitter originally.)

[birke]

Also, if people like puns, I found it by checking my "puns" tag: http://pathless-wood.tumblr.com/tagged/puns

[kaberett]

Thank you!

[sylvaine]

Oh this is an excellent shiny thing to know :D

[jelazakazone]

OMG this is awesome! Thanks.

[conuly]

Turkish is quite a language, and that's all I'm gonna say on that subject.

[kaberett]

... I mean, it isn't Indo-European, and in that sense makes an interesting challenge for me (though it also isn't my first non-IE language -- arguably, BSL is, though my ability to have conversations in BSL is probably worse than my ability to have conversations in Turkish at this point). And I'm very pleased about how much more of the local conversations I can now understand snippets of!

[conuly]

And I'm very pleased about how much more of the local conversations I can now understand snippets of!

Eavesdropping is always a good goal :P

[davidgillon]

* If you can remember which web comic it was that I read this joke in recently I'd be very grateful.

Apparently you have a time machine, because it's a joke in this Monday's Gunnerkrigg Court http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1870