The Latin nominative of death is mors. Google tells me a fungus (does that count?) contains it: one species of Powdery mildew is Gooseberry mildew, Linnean name: Sphaerotheca mors-uvae. “Spherical container, death of grapes.”
Category: Uncategorized
Why is Oxfordshire known as Oxon?
Oxon is an abbreviation of Oxonium, the Latin name of Oxford.
What is the English word for “Papanicolaou”?
If on the other hand you mean the surname, it translates to “[offspring] of the Priest Nicholas”.
How do you say ‘Let bygones, be bygones’ in different languages?
More boring in Greek: περασμένα ξεχασμένα, “passed, forgotten”.
Edit: And because it’s ear-worming me, the song with that title by Katy Garbi. If it sounds Arabic, that’s correct: it’s a cover of an Egyptian original. Ελληνοαραβικός «πόλεμος» για τραγούδι της Καίτης Γαρμπή
Has emergence of case system ever been observed?
Though it doesn’t look like Indo-European case, serial verb constructions have ended up turning into case markers. An instance is Chinese ba, which is primarily the verb “take”, but which has started to act like an accusative marker: “I take spear look” > “I ACC spear look”, I pick up the spear to look at it > I look at the spear.
Why was bronze chosen as a third place signifier?
The ranking Gold > Silver > Bronze > Iron (> Lead) dates from Hesiod: see Ages of Man. Bronze for toolmaking in common use is older than Iron; Hesiod was aware of that, which is why his Bronze Age is earlier than his Iron Age. Gold and Silver would have outranked Bronze and Iron, because they were precious metals (better suited to describe an ideal past), and Bronze and Iron weren’t.
Per Wikipedia: Bronze, the ranking in Olympic medals derives from Hesiod’s ranking, but was only put in place in the 1904 Olympics; before that, it was 1st place Silver, 2nd place Bronze.
Using UML, can we model life itself with everything in it?
UML Class Diagrams can express hierarchical ontologies, and associations.
Upper Ontologies are intended to model all entities that can be hierarchically related. So if you’re ambitious enough (see: Douglas Lenat), upper ontologies can model life itself with everything in it; and associations can model (at least at first approximation) all relations between with everything within life.
So yeah, sure.
That’d be an awfully big wallpaper diagram though…
What is the best biography of Richard Nixon?
For time depth and sobriety, the first biography I read is still the best: Nixon by Stephen E. Ambrose. The in-depth coverage of his vice-presidency (from an historian who was an Eisenhower fan) explains a lot.
Of the others, I wanted to like Fawn M. Brodie‘s Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, but it was disappointingly farfetched.
What is the degree of intelligibility between Standard Modern Greek and Cretan Greek?
I’ve done the Swadesh list lexicostatistics: 89 of 100 core words, which is comparable to Russian and Ukrainian. (I get the same figure for Cypriot.) Mutually intelligible, but just. Much more now that the dialect is dying out.
I was exposed to the dialect 30 years ago when it wasn’t doing as badly; so I’m not necessarily the right person to ask; I’d be interested in others’ opinion.
Where did the word Nemesis originate?
Nemesis, “Greek goddess of vengeance, personification of divine wrath,” from Greek nemesis “just indignation, righteous anger,” literally “distribution” (of what is due), related to nemein “distribute, allot, apportion one’s due”.
Goes on to note that the word is cognate to German nehmen “take”.
Conceptually, Nemesis is the same notion as one’s “lot” (allotment)—which also underlies the Greek name for the Fates, Moirai (literally: “shares”).