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Seriously, though. How often do you think of the Roman Empire? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by 1bluepixel@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

122 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I know this is a joke/meme, but I sincerely think of the Roman Empire a surprising amount of times. I find myself obsessing over how Roman citizens were living just as complex lives as we are today, or about Marcus Aurelius' life and philosophy, or about how the Republic fell and became a totalitarian state.

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[–] aramus@lemmy.world 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think about words and their etymology a lot. Of course many words have their origin in Latin. And then I am amazed how they used kind of the the same word ~2k years ago.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And then I am amazed how they used kind of the the same word ~2k years ago.

This sort of borrowing tends to get crazy in the Romance languages. Because often the Latin word did survive, but underwent change, then someone re-borrowed the word from Latin and now it's living side-to-side with its ancestor. ...except that people in the Middle Ages were already doing this, so the reborrowed word might evolve, and someone might reborrow a third version of the word, recursively.

In English there's also the case of words being borrowed from Latin, except that those words have a native Germanic cognate, like verb vs. word.

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago

This just made me have a fun observation: Message Of The Day used to be a common thing in the earlier days of computing (still pretty normal on stuff like game servers), and the initialism MOTD contains the french word for "word" (mot)!