• crapwittyname@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    The forest of Skund was indeed enchanted, which was nothing unusual on the Disc, and was also the only forest in the whole universe to be called – in the local language – Your Finger You Fool, which was the literal meaning of the word Skund.

    The reason for this is regrettably all too common. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don’t Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.

    Rainclouds clustered around the bald heights of Mt. Oolskunrahod (‘Who is this Fool who does Not Know what a Mountain is’) and the Luggage settled itself more comfortably under a dripping tree, which tried unsuccessfully to strike up a conversation.

    Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

  • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Reminds me of the Disney movie Brave:

    The royal castle is called Castle Dunbroch (Castle Castlecastle) and it also prominently features Eurasian Brown Bears, whose species name is Ursus arctos arctos (Bear bear bear)

    • ArbitraryValue
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      5 months ago

      Romans got to determine the terminology that people would use for thousands of years.

      Celts got their culture disrespected and forgotten.

      • ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Idk. Feels like splitting hairs.

        On one hand you’re right about the culture thing. On the other hand imagine a translation mistake lasting thousands of years.

        • OsaErisXero@kbin.run
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          5 months ago

          If anything, it’s a little based of the Romans. They didn’t come in and rename them all Claudius Flavius or Biggus Dickus or whatever, they just asked the locals for their names, wrote them down, and left them as what the locals called them.

    • merde alors
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      5 months ago

      The modern Turkish name İstanbul (pronounced [isˈtanbuɫ]) (Ottoman Turkish: استانبول) is attested (in a range of variants) since the 10th century, at first in Armenian and Arabic (without the initial İ-) and then in Ottoman sources. It probably comes from the Greek phrase “στὴν Πόλι” [stimˈboli], meaning “in the city”, reinterpreted as a single word; a similar case is Stimboli, Crete. It is thus based on the common Greek usage of referring to Constantinople simply as The City.

    • tempest@lemmy.ca
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      5 months ago

      This is what I came looking for.

      Sometimes I wonder if the government should buy unskipable YouTube ads and just run these so future generations can experience it.

  • AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space
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    5 months ago

    Also, the Yarra River in Melbourne, named by settlers after the Wurundjeri word for river or rapids. Their actual name for that particular river was Birrarung.