#Latin

[yvanspijk]

The words right and rectum have a common origin. Right comes from Proto-Germanic *rehtaz ('straight; right; just'). This word shared a common Proto-Indo-European ancestor with Latin rēctus ('straight; right; just'), from which the medical term rectum ('straight terminal part of the large intestine') was derived. The infographic shows more.

[blvvdk3ep]

I love you people going into "useless" fields I love you classics majors I love you cultural studies majors I love you comparative literature majors I love you film studies majors I love you near eastern religions majors I love you Greek, Latin, and Hebrew majors I love you ethnic studies I love you people going into any and all small field that isn't considered lucrative in our rotting capitalist society please never stop keeping the sacred flame of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and understanding humanity and not merely for the sake of money alive

[artthatgivesmefeelings]

Rafael Romero Barros (Spanish, 1832-1895) Still life with oranges, 1863

[volumina-vetustiora]

what the fuck

saxo cere comminuit brum

what the actual fuck

[apas-95]

[livousart]

brazilian beaches: stairs

[nation-of-bros]

Damn, those dark almond eyes are irresistible.

[candela888]

Countries where cheek kissing is a common way of greeting people

Number of cheek kisses when greeting somebody in the Americas and Europe

[thoodleoo]

been reading cicero's rant about words being given obscene meanings and i don't think i've ever seen a latin sentence that made me burst into such immediate and violent laughter before

[joytri]

boarding school aesthetic

[singing-graverobber]

I think one of the most beautiful things about learning an ancient or dead language, is the pure humanity thereof.

You could do or learn something more functional, sure, but you're taking time to understand the essence of a people long left behind in time.

These people, now dead for centuries or even millennia, wrote things down and in doing so, said:

"I was here, remember me"

And here, eras later, we take time to decipher, read, and understand it, to say into the void of their existence:

"We see you, we know you, you are still alive."

[jackxo]

𝕳𝖊𝖓𝖗𝖞 𝖂𝖎𝖓𝖙𝖊𝖗

[foone]

So an interesting thing about Latin is that the word for "sword" is "gladius" and the word for "scabbard" is "vagina".

But here's the weird thing: in classical times, "gladius" was used as a slang word for "penis", but "vagina" was not used as a slang word for "vagina"!

The weird thing is that their term for the "vagina" was "vulva". Now... I'm not being lazy here and meaning the internal and external genitals as "vagina": when they said "vulva", they only meant the internal genitals. They even called the womb "vulva".

Anyways. For the external genitals, what we now would say "vulva" for, they'd use... "cunnus", probably? That's a vulgar word, I'm not even sure what you'd use if you weren't trying to be derogatory.

Although it's amusing to find out that "cunnus" isn't related to "cunt" or "cunny" at all. "cunt" comes from Proto-Germanic (where it meant the same, just not vulgar), and "cunny" goes back to a different Proto-Germanic word that meant "to know".

Anyway the worst Latin-dervived term for female genitalia is "pudendum/pudenda", because it was directly taken from medieval (I believe?) Latin where it meant the same, but if you know latin you can also translate it to which it means: "that whereof one ought to feel shame". Yeah, it's off the verb "pudeō/pudēro": "to shame". Fucking yikes.

And along those lines, reportedly a roman slang term for the female genitalia was "culpa", which means a fault or defect. Yikes again.

The final bit of weirdness is that "genitalia" is also a Latin word: but it doesn't mean the genitals, not specifically. It's instead a neutral plural for an adjective that means "related to birth or production".

So yeah. It's weird that English has so many Latin roots and then a fuck ton of weird false-friends in this area. I've heard that some of this is because of medieval renaming to move away from more sexualized terms (that's actually how we got the term "penis", which is a latin word meaning "tail"), but I can't completely verify that.

All this is on top of the consistent thing where English has that fun thing where we often have two words for something, and the one with Germanic roots will be vulgar, and the one with Latin roots will be formal. Fucking is vulgar, copulation is formal. Rude germanic barbarians shit, refined roman citizens defecate. the germanic peasants raise a cow , but when the anglo-saxon upperclass see it on their plate, it's beef.