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jim mcnamara
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What is yellow, sour, and equivalent to the axiom of choice?
Zorn's Lemon
I promise I haven't looked:jim mcnamara said:What is yellow, sour, and equivalent to the axiom of choice?
Zorn's Lemon
If I did, my wife (who taught German for many years) would whack me over the head with her German dictionary.fresh_42 said:Do you write Schadenfreude with a "c"?
Shouldn't this be the opposite: "If I did not, my wife ...", 'cause in German it is "Sch". However, it's pronounced "sh" in English and not "sch" as in school. I'm asking as in the other direction, i.e. if we adopt English words, they are sometimes changed a little bit to better fit. I would have expected similar the other way around, esp. with such minor changes.jtbell said:If I did, my wife (who taught German for many years) would whack me over the head with her German dictionary.
I think usually in English we simply borrow foreign words "as is", not changing their spelling except maybe dropping umlauts, accent marks, etc. Sometimes we mangle the pronunciation to make it "fit" the spelling or English pronunciation habits better. However, the German 'sch' is familiar enough in English that we simply leave it alone. Think of all the people with names like Schultz, Schubert, etc. And Busch and Schlitz beers.fresh_42 said:if we adopt English words, they are sometimes changed a little bit to better fit. I would have expected similar the other way around, esp. with such minor changes.
Generally, the "sk" words are derived from Greek, while the "sh" words are borrowed from German. But that doesn't help much if you don't know the etymology. And there are exceptions, e.g. schist is derived from the same Greek root as schizophrenic and schism (which, incidentally, I've heard as skizm and sizm, but never shizm).gmax137 said:"uh oh, 'sch' sounds like 'sk' unless it sounds like 'sh'"
Nice info, thanks! I wonder how English natives learn Russian? We have two "sh" sounds: sch and ch - somehow a full and an empty version. Most Americans can't pronounce "ch". They make a "k" out of it. Now IIRC the Russians have a least four versions, the different "s" not counted!mjc123 said:Generally, the "sk" words are derived from Greek, while the "sh" words are borrowed from German. But that doesn't help much if you don't know the etymology.
And schedule is pronounced differently in British English ("shedule") as compared to American English ("skedule").gmax137 said:trying to develop rules for english is hopeless .
school
scheme
schizophrenic
Mark44 said:Also schism and schist both have to do with something that is split (schist is split into layers).
the original word in Greek started with a sound closer to sk- or skh-, with the kh sound like the ch in "ach!"
And if he merely suffered a setback, he's a silverfish.fresh_42 said:Now he's a bronzefish.
And when he manages to get a magician show in Vegas, he's a Copperfish.jtbell said:And if he merely suffered a setback, he's a silverfish.
A train that left the tracks wouldn't get far.jtbell said:Two guys in a car pull up to a railroad crossing.
Guy 1: "Hmmm, looks like a train just went by."
Guy 2: "How can you tell?"
Guy 1: "It left tracks."
DrGreg said:A train that left the tracks wouldn't get far.
Unless it's in Tobleronistan. It would get eaten fast! ...mfb said:That makes it easier to identify it.
oh dear hahahajtbell said:Two guys in a car pull up to a railroad crossing.
Guy 1: "Hmmm, looks like a train just went by."
Guy 2: "How can you tell?"
Guy 1: "It left tracks."
I vote for Celsius' original scale, which had had 0° as boiling point and 100° as freezing point. Or if it had to be upside down, then what about Réaumur?Psinter said:https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/unit-conventions-si-versus-others.902547/
Why use K (Kelvin) when you can use F (units of Freedom).
On a probably off-topic comment, Practice exams I have seen for those who want to join the US military, they work the math for gravity in ft/s^2, not m/s^2.
Psinter said:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_CelsiusCelsius was the first to perform and publish careful experiments aiming at the definition of an international temperature scale on scientific grounds. ... He proposed the Celsius temperature scale in a paper to the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, the oldest Swedish scientific society, founded in 1710. His thermometer was calibrated with a value of 100° for the freezing point of water and 0° for the boiling point. In 1745, a year after Celsius' death, the scale was reversed by Carl Linnaeus to facilitate more practical measurement. Celsius originally called his scale centigrade derived from the Latin for "hundred steps". For years it was simply referred to as the Swedish thermometer.
Me reading a thermometer like that would be:fresh_42 said:
fresh_42 said:Did you know, that a small little honeybee collects more honey on a single day than a full-grown elephant within an entire year?
that's like this one. (I'll have to make it up as I don't remember the exact version )fresh_42 said:Did you know, that a small little honeybee collects more honey on a single day than a full-grown elephant within an entire year?