X-ray = Roentgeni
Jet = Reactivni
It is strange how language and meaning are related. How does a jet engine work? Newton said "Every action has an equal and opposite reaction", or so we are told, and so of course the jet engine works in this manner. Reaction. If you grow up with this terminology, would you ever become, later in life, confused as to how a spaceship works, since there is nothing for the fire out the back of the ship to "push on"? Some people were confused about this during the space race in the 20th century, at least in the United States.
What about X-Rays? How does that become "Roentgen"? Roentgen was the guy who discovered X-rays. Why, in English, did the word become X-ray then?
It's not just English.
There appear to be, basically, two major groups - some languages use Roentgen in the word for X-Ray, and some languages that just use the letter 'X'. Then there are some that have their own thing (Inuktitut for example) but they are a very small proportion.
Here is a brief list of how various languages say 'X-ray', taken from Wikipedia's page on X-ray - that is, the languages with semi-latin alphabets. The list is broken into the two groups described above. Please forgive my amateur transliterations of cyrillic (Bulgarian etc).
The X-Rayers
Asturian (Spain) - Rayos X
Breton - Skinoù X
Catalan - Raigs X
Welsh - Pelydr-X
Greek - Ακτίνες Χ
English - X-Ray
Esperanto - Ikso-radioj
Spanish - Rayos X
Basque - X izpi
French - Rayon X
Gan Chinese - X光
Galician - Raios X
Fiji Hindi - X-ray
Haitian Creole - Reyon X
Bahasa Indonesian - Sinar-X
Italian - Raggi X
Japanese - X線
Basa Jawa (Indonesia) - Sinar-X
Ligurian (Italy) - Raggi X
Malayan - Sinar-X
Occitan (France/Italy/Spain) - Rais X
Oromoo - X-rays
Portugese - Raios X
Romanian - Radiație X
Sicilian - Raggi X
Serbo-Croatian - X-zrake
Sundanese (Indonesia, Java) - Sinar X
Tagalog )Flipino) - Rayo ekis
Turkish - X-ray
Uyghur - X ئۇيغۇرچە
Vietnamese - Tia X
Waray Waray (Phillipines) - Rayos ekis
Chinese - X射线
The Roentgens
Azerbaijan - Rentgen şüalari
Samogitian (Lithuania) - Rentgena spėndolē
Bulgarian - Rengenovo Lchenie
Ukranian - Rentgenivski Viprominuvannya
Tatar (Russia) - Rentgen Nurlanshi
Swedish - Röntgsenstrålning
Slovakian - Röntgenové žiarenie
Slovenian - Rentgenski žarki
Polish - Promieniowanie rentgenowskie
Netherlands (Dutch) - Röntgenstraling
Norwegian - Røntgenstråling
Lithuanian - Rentgeno spinduliai
Latvian - Rentgenstari
Macedonian - Rentgenski Zratsi
Bosnian - Rendgensko zračenje
Czech - Rentenové záření
Danish - Røntgenstråling
German - Röntgenstrahlung
Finnish - Röntgensäteily
Hungarian (Magyar) - Röntgensugárzás
Icelandic - Röntgengeislun
Kazhakstani - Rentgen Seooleleri
Lak (Caucasus Mountains / Dagestan / Russia) - Rentgendalul tinttu
Serbian - Rendgenske zrake
Their own special thing
Inuktitut (Canada/Alaska/Greeland) - taraqtuut
What can one determine from all this? Is there a pattern? I've no idea.
But, here is a very crude map. In the purple countries, they say 'X-ray' (or whatever their version of 'ray' is). In the Green countries they say Roentgen, and maybe 'ray' as well, depending. In Brown areas, well, that is Inuktitut, who made up their own word. Black countries were places that were not researched for this blog post. There's only 24 hours in the day ya know.
(Released under License: Creative Commons CC BY SA 3.0, as a derived work from Wikipedia Blank World Map by Al McDonald, hyper-metrix | twitter account @F1LT3R )
By the way.
Don't get Slovenian mixed up with Slovakian!
One is named Slovenčina
One is named Slovenščina
See? Totally different.
No comments:
Post a Comment