Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderLanguage fact

The English word ‘disaster’ comes from the Italian for ‘ill-starred’, from a time when misfortune was blamed on the stars. Other everyday words keep old history too: ‘quarantine’ comes from the Italian for forty days, and ‘robot’ from a Czech word for forced labour.

Merriam-Webster synthesis

ScienceLanguage

The story behind the card

Disaster reached English in the 1590s through French désastre, from Italian disastro: dis-, meaning bad, and astro, star. In astrology a planet in the wrong position was thought to bring calamity, and English still says ‘ill-starred’. Quarantine goes back to plague-era ports. In 1377 the city of Ragusa, now Dubrovnik in Croatia, made new arrivals wait 30 days in isolation, and in 1448 Venice extended the wait to 40 days, quaranta giorni in Italian. Robot first appeared in Karel Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R., about artificial workers. Čapek said his brother Josef suggested the word, based on the Czech robota, the unpaid labour serfs owed their lords. The American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson put the idea neatly in 1844: ‘Language is fossil poetry.’

Türkçe oku
İngilizcede “felaket” anlamına gelen disaster sözcüğü, “kötü yıldızlı” anlamındaki İtalyanca disastro'dan gelir; talihsizliğin yıldızlara yorulduğu çağlardan kalmıştır. Bizim de kullandığımız iki sözcük eski tarih taşır: Karantina İtalyancada “kırk gün”den, robot ise Çekçede angarya anlamına gelen robota'dan türedi.

Disaster, 1590'larda Fransızca désastre yoluyla İtalyanca disastro'dan İngilizceye geçti: dis- “kötü”, astro ise “yıldız” demektir. Astrolojiye göre yanlış konumdaki bir gezegen felaket getirirdi. Karantina, veba yıllarının liman kentlerinden kalmadır. 1377'de, bugün Hırvatistan'daki Dubrovnik olan Ragusa kenti, dışarıdan gelenleri 30 gün yalıtımda bekletmeye başladı; 1448'de Venedik bu süreyi 40 güne, İtalyancasıyla quaranta giorni'ye çıkardı. Robot sözcüğü ilk kez Karel Čapek'in yapay işçileri anlatan 1920 tarihli oyunu R.U.R.'da geçti. Čapek'e göre sözcüğü kardeşi Josef önermişti; kaynağı, serflerin efendilerinin topraklarında karşılıksız yapmak zorunda olduğu işi, yani angaryayı anlatan Çekçe robota'dır. Amerikalı yazar Ralph Waldo Emerson bu fikri 1844'te kısaca şöyle dile getirmişti: “Dil, fosilleşmiş şiirdir.”

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Etymology
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderLanguage

The Latin verb scire, 'to know', sits behind a surprising family of English words: science, conscience, omniscient, prescient. The odd relative is nice. It comes from nescius, 'not knowing', and when it entered English in the late 1200s it meant foolish or ignorant.

Science first meant simply knowledge of any kind, from Latin scientia. The narrower sense, the study of nature by observation and experiment, came later, and the word 'scientist' was coined only in 1833, by the English scholar William Whewell. Conscience comes from conscientia, 'knowing with', which could mean knowledge shared with others or knowledge held within oneself. Omniscient adds omnis, 'all', and prescient adds prae, 'before'. Nescius is simply ne-, 'not', joined to the same verb, so 'nice' began life as the opposite of 'science'. Turkish has a similar family built on its own verb for knowing, bil-: bilgi (knowledge) and bilge (wise) are old words, while bilim (science) and bilinç (consciousness) were coined during the language reform of the 1930s.

EtymologyRead card
WonderLanguage

Algebra takes its name from al-jabr, a word in the title of a textbook written in Baghdad around 820 by the Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. His own name, turned into Latin as Algoritmi, gave us the word algorithm.

Al-Khwarizmi worked in Baghdad under the caliph al-Ma'mun, at the centre of learning known as the House of Wisdom. His book, The Concise Book of Calculation by Restoration and Balancing, showed step by step how to solve equations. Al-jabr, “restoration”, meant moving a subtracted quantity to the other side of an equation; al-muqabala, “balancing”, meant cancelling equal terms on both sides. Robert of Chester translated the book into Latin in 1145, and it remained a main mathematics textbook in European universities until the 16th century. Another of his works explained the Hindu-Arabic numerals we use today. Its 12th-century Latin translation opened with the words “Dixit Algorizmi”, “so said al-Khwarizmi”, and from his Latinised name, algorism, later algorithm, came to mean a step-by-step method of calculation. His name itself means “the man from Khwarazm”, a region in today's Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

EtymologyRead card
WonderHistory

A Christian prayer book finished in 1229 hides lost works by Archimedes. Its maker scraped the ink from a 10th-century copy of his writings and wrote the prayers over it.

A manuscript that has been scraped and written over is called a palimpsest. This one holds the only known copy of Archimedes's Method of Mechanical Theorems, in which he found areas and volumes by imagining shapes cut into countless thin slices, an idea close to later calculus. It also holds his Stomachion puzzle and the only surviving Greek text of On Floating Bodies. The parchment was reused in 1229, probably in Jerusalem. In 1906 the Danish scholar Johan Ludvig Heiberg spotted the mathematics beneath the prayers in Istanbul. The book then vanished for decades, suffered from mould, and had forged pictures painted over some pages. Sold at auction in 1998 for $2 million, it was studied at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore from 1999 to 2008, where ultraviolet, infrared and X-ray imaging recovered much of the hidden text.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderLanguage

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) gives each speech sound its own symbol. Since 1888 it has let linguists write down how words in any language are actually pronounced, whatever their spelling.

The alphabet comes from the International Phonetic Association, founded in Paris in 1886 by French and British language teachers led by Paul Passy, who wanted one notation that would work for any language. Most symbols are Latin letters, with extra letters and small marks added for sounds that Latin has no letter for, such as the clicks of some southern African languages. Dictionaries use it because spelling is an unreliable guide: English 'read' is said two ways, and the IPA writes them differently, /riːd/ and /rɛd/. The Association still revises its chart when phoneticians agree on changes.

International Phonetic AssociationRead card
WonderLanguage

Serendipity, the knack of finding good things by chance, is a word the English writer Horace Walpole coined in a 1754 letter. He took it from a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes kept discovering, 'by accidents and sagacity', things they were not looking for.

Walpole, son of the prime minister Robert Walpole and later author of the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, used the word on 28 January 1754 in a letter to his friend Horace Mann, the British envoy in Florence. He had just found something he needed, by chance, in an old book. Serendip is an old name for Sri Lanka, and the tale reached Europe through an Italian version of 1557 based on the Persian poet Amir Khusrau. The word stayed rare until the 20th century. Today it describes discoveries that need both luck and a sharp eye, as when Alexander Fleming noticed in 1928 that a mould had killed the bacteria on a culture plate, the observation that led to penicillin.

Horace Walpole, 1754Read card
Next card in the archiveOnly 65 years separate the Wright brothers' first powered flight, 37 m (120 ft) in 12 seconds on 17 December 1903, from the Moon landing of July 1969. Neil Armstrong carried a piece of the Wright Flyer's wing fabric and a sliver of its propeller wood with him to the Moon.Read next →