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by reissbaker 928 days ago
Next, Greece will charge Amazonas royalties for using their brand, since the Amazons were ancient Greek myths.
3 comments

If Greece starts doing this, they can levy a tax on most things in the Western world!
Well yes but it cuts both ways. "Greece" (Ελλάδα - Hellada) is not a "Greek" (Ελληνικά - Hellonika) word. Sorry if I've screwed up the transliteration, its all Greek to me!

Whenever a Έλληνας (Hellonas - I think) uses the term Greek or other Anglicised word then we (whoever we are) could sue right back!

Modern Greek is just as close to old or classical Greek (and that's a PHD discussion) as modern English to German or Dutch (and that's another diss.) Throw in borrow words, pidgins, creoles and that and it gets complicated very quickly.

I won't deny that say, ichthphi ... (OK I searched, I can say it but not spell it) ... Ichthyophthirius is Greek derived and possibly one of the finest tongue-twisters known to man, casually thrashing physalis and the like. Closer to home, politics and other words derived from Greek (mostly an old version) are more familiar examples.

Language is always a tricksy thing. When I was a child I studied Latin, French, German and English. All to a greater or lesser extent. Now I'm 50+, I actually understand some of the interplay between them. That doesn't mean that I can speak German (bit sad - I lived in West Germany for some years) but I do understand why Wegburg and Waybury look suspiciously similar.

Nearly all languages these days are an amalgam. English is famous for "stealing" words but it isn't alone, by any means. Welsh borrows mercilessly from English for obvious reasons. However, what all languages have is some sort of cultural independence, be it accent, words, diacritics, alphabet, pronunciation or even sheer bloody mindedness.

> Ichthyophthirius

Anecdata, but for a native Russian speaker this is not a tongue twister at all. We borrowed quite a few letters for Cyrillic alphabet and have dedicated sounds for them. This word becomes a shorter "ихтиофтириус", which has a much nicer visual balance of vowels and consonants

I'm not an expert in linguistics but I do know how my mouth and tongue works! I apologise that I can't give examples in Cyrillic.

This word is roughly pronounced "ick", "thee", "oh", "fuh", "thirius". The surprising thing in English is the ph-th bit - we only see that in Greek words and perhaps some Russian or other Cyrillic based borrow words.

When I look at it, we English use two letters for each of these phonemes: ph (fuh) and th (thuh). In Cyrillic I think you have a single letter: phi and theta (Greek) - I don't know the actual Russian names but it will be similar.

We can say fuh/thuh in a word as consecutive phonemes but it is rare.

> This word is roughly pronounced "ick", "thee", "oh", "fuh", "thirius". That's very close in Russian (and other Slavic languages FWITW); if I were to transliterate Russian pronunciation it would be "ikh-tio-fte-rius".

> The surprising thing in English is the ph-th bit

Interesting! I thought it would be the "ch-thy" part since "ch" usually sounds "t-sh"-ish in English, like "child".

I wonder if in English this phoneme uses the "k" sound only for words like "chrysanthemum" or "chrysalis" borrowed from Greek-ish languages.

> I don't know the actual Russian names but it will be similar.

Actually "ф" is just "ph" as in Philadelphia and "т" is "t", very close to how it sounds in the word "term". I think the key difference is that the "th" (sounds like in "the", "they", etc.) phoneme is a separate letter so it's decoupled from "t".

> This word is roughly pronounced "ick", "thee", "oh", "fuh", "thirius".

Nah, closer to "ick-thee-off-thirius": https://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/ichthyophthirius

> the surprising thing in English is the ph-th bit

Right, especially not having a vowel between them, because "f" -> "th" without an intervening vowel is very unusual in English.

I think you just solved the financial issues for the entire Greek economy
Including ChatGPT. I once asked it to choose a nickname and after a lot of attempting to block the request it said:

I'll choose the nickname "Athena" for ChatGPT. Athena is the Greek goddess of wisdom, knowledge, and strategic thinking, which reflects the purpose and functionality of ChatGPT as an AI language model designed to provide information and assistance.

Funny how it didn't mention Athena is also the goddess of war...

Better yet, just a tiny 1-2% tax on any project, program or company that ever used anything Greek as a codename. Keeps you under the radar
And anything in Beta
Plus a usage tax on Greek-derived words!
Oracle, Delphi, Minotaur, Ikarus, what else?
I feel like almost every European word has a Greek root deep down. Even the Latin ones sometimes come from Greek.
Alpha, Beta etc :)
Kerberos
and/or mathematical notation.
I like that idea, but more because it would discourage oh-so-clever names for projects.
Also India should own 50% of everyone's data as they invented the zero.
That patent expired.
They also invented the numbers and numbering systems in use so that should be way higher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E2%80%93Arabic_numeral_s...

All software that uses /dev/zero will have to pay India royalties.
Meta should be afraid.