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In Icelandic "computer" is tölva, a portmanteau of the words for number and seeress.
by _moof 3y ago
In Icelandic "computer" is tölva, a portmanteau of the words for number and seeress.
- gilleain 3y agoThat's amazing : https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/t%C3%B6lva https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/t%C3%B6lva "A portmanteau word, coined by Sigurður Nordal in 1965 from tala (“number”) + völva (“prophetess”)."
- _moof 3y agoThey go out of their way to make new words rather than borrowing. Or at least they used to. That may have started to change in more recent times.
- hef19898 3y agoOr simi for telephone. Another near universal word would be police, wouldn't it? Iceland of course is one of the exceptions! I found those fun facts about Icelandic very fascinating when I first visited decades ago as a teenager.
- gilleain 3y agoIs 'police' that universal? I know Irish have the Gardaí - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garda_S%C3%ADoch%C3%A1na https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garda_S%C3%ADoch%C3%A1na. Yes, Icelandic has 'Lögreglu' and Greece has Αστυνομία (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenic_Police https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenic_Police) but indeed most places use some variant of 'police'.
- swiftcoder 3y ago`Gardaí` is more of a formal name for a specific insitution. The Irish language still has the more generic word `póilín`, which appears to be at least phonetically related to the english `police`.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y agoPolice is Rendőrség in Hungarian, translating to something like “order guard establishment” (-ség corresponds to -ness or -ery suffix in English, more or less, like “pékség” is bakery)
- misterben 3y agoAnd robot is vélmenni, machine man. Very resistant to loan words.