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#25 (permalink) | |
...here to hear...
Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: He lives on Love Street
Posts: 4,444
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Wow! That long key with a black plastic head is pretty strange looking, Mucha!
Quote:
Spoiler for origins of "key":
Short answer: Key as in lock comes from the sound of an old germanic tribes word, originally written in Old English as "caeg". Old English means that it comes from about 500 C.E. Key as in keyboard, comes, via the piano perhaps, from the translation of a Latin musical term, "clavis", and dates from about 1450 C.E. That's a thousand-year difference in origin, so I'm going for "no connection between the two meanings, just a coincidence of sound and spelling." The two different origins of "key" reminded me of a curious aspect of English. It has lots of simple everyday words that come from very old germanic tribes. Cat, dog, cow are useful words when you live in a rudimentary village (or so I imagine). But then English also has elegant Latin-based words from when it was invaded by the French and became connected to the Classical world of Rome and Greece. So we have the more scientific adjectives, feline, canine, bovine. So that's the opposite of the word "key". Instead of one word with two unrelated meanings, with "cat-feline" we have a connected meaning, but two unrelated words.
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