Asklemmy

44151 readers

1346 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

249

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

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

119 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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 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)!