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The word is still used in modern Greek to denote time. For example, you can say "καιρός να κόψω το τσιγάρο" to say that it's a good time for you to quit smoking
by Arisaka1 5y ago
The word is still used in modern Greek to denote time. For example, you can say "καιρός να κόψω το τσιγάρο" to say that it's a good time for you to quit smoking.
And just for laughs, Greece being a country driven by tourism has many people who would attempt to communicate with tourists in English. As such, we have humorous mistranslations poking fun in those who try to speak English by translating the Greek phrase word for word, like "do you have weather for coffee?" because the Greek sentence is "έχεις καιρό για καφέ;" which can also easily be interpreted as "can you find an opening in your schedule to go for a cup of coffee with me?"
- sm4rk0 5y agoIt's similar in Serbian (and Croat) - the word for "time", "vreme" also means "weather": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vreme#Serbo-Croatian https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vreme#Serbo-Croatian
- sergioisidoro 5y agoSame thing for Portuguese "tempo"
- Case81 5y agoExact same word in Romanian, huh
- rcthompson 5y agoI wonder if the English words tempest and temporal have the same word root. (Edit: Indeed, I see someone posted this exact example in another comment thread.)
- bandie91 5y agosame in Hungarian: idő = time, weather. and in Latin and in many roman languages.
- nesarkvechnep 5y agoSame in Bulgarian.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoI love when different languages use one word to mean seemingly unrelated (or at most tangentially related) things, but in the same way. In French the word for time is also used for weather, e.g. "Le temps est nuageux" is "The weather is cloudy" and "Y a-t-il assez de temps" is "Is there enough time?".
- forty 5y agoApparently this double meaning also already existed in Latin (tempus) so it must have spreaded to many languages after that (both from the Greek and Latin roots)
- Grieving 5y agoAnother one that stuck with me is that "matsu" in Japanese matches both English senses of "pine": the pine tree, or being consumed with longing.
- VRay 5y agoThose are different words with different kanji 松 - pine tree 待つ - wait Japanese has a ludicrous number of homophones and words that sound like homophones to non-native speakers, so I dunno if there’s much advantage to digging into them
- Grieving 5y agoYeah, it's not quite the same situation, but it's an interesting synchronicity. They're technically different words in English as well, but have converged in pronunciation and spelling. It's not just a random set of homophones, but served as a pun in the title of Matsukaze. It's as though the "nothing" in Much Ado About Nothing just happened to have all of the same double-meanings in Japanese as in Elizabethan English ("gossip", "vagina").
- Koshkin 5y agoAlso, from an online dictionary, tempest Middle English tempeste, borrowed from Anglo-French, going back to Vulgar Latin tempesta, replacing Latin tempestāt-, tempestās “stretch of time, period, season, weather, stormy weather”
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]