Starting the 14th century, the Netherlands began to reclaim land in order to protect its existence. First done with the help of primitive dikes and from the 15th century with usage of windmills as drainage pumps.

In the late Middle Ages, Niderlant was a territory between Meuse (🇳🇱 Maas) and Rhine (🇩🇪 Rhein), including today's Lower Rhine (🇩🇪 Niederrhein) in Germany. It was called so as opposed to Oberland, which began around the Cologne (🇩🇪 Köln) area. With 26% of its current territory situated below sea level, Netherlands literally means "lower countries".

🇭🇷 Nizozemska
🇫🇮 Alankomaat
🇫🇷 Pays Bas
🇮🇪 An Ísiltír

#dutch #croatian #finnish #french #irish

Maschinengewehr 08 (MG 08) was a standard German machine gun made in 1908 and used in World War I. In 1915 there was a "rather misguided attempt" to improve the gun, make it lighter and portable. Despite better developments such as from Bergmann and Dreyse, MG 08/15 remained the most used common machine gun deployed by Germany in WWI.

Soldiers had to complete daily lengthy,monotonous and sometimes boring routines with MG 08/15. Some gun parts were standardized and could be produced by the factories making bicycles or typing machines. Maybe that also led to ever-decreasing quality and reliability of MG 08/15, but the fact is, it all coined an interesting phrase, which is still in use today.

Whenever something is extra ordinary, and not in a good way, pejoratively average and maybe even "standardized" and subpar, the Germans would say it's "Null-acht-fünfzehn", 08/15.
#german

Funny enough, once I switched from a startup to an enterprise, where agile rituals were religiously followed, the development speed overall seemed to stall. One of those rituals was a meeting of grooming or trying to specify the tasks in more detail.

The other day I was watching a Kazakh podcast where the speakers were discussing how the public tends to neglect their terrible deeds or allegations, like sexual misconduct, when it comes to their favorite artists. And this is how I learned that the word grooming has one other meaning, to gain trust of a child or vulnerable person in order to take advantage of or exploit them, especially sexually.

For writing software, let's maybe use the term refinement instead.
#english

Whether it's Afrikaans skryf, Bokmål skrive, Faroese skriva or Yiddish שרײַבן‎ the verb to write is derived from Latin scrībere.

Romance languages prefer the Latin origin as well, as seen in Aragonese escriure, Corsican scriva, Galician escrever and Romanian scrie, among others.

Where does the English to write come from, if not from Romance or Germanic (which are the same in this case) origins?

With some exceptions like Old Church Slavonic pьsā́tī*, which meant to paint, the majority of Indo-European languages, including Old Germanic wrītan, Latin scrībere and Greek γράφω*, used the words which originally meant "to carve, scratch, cut" to describe the act of writing.

So English "to write" is a cognate of German reißen, "to tear, rip", Swedish rita, "to draw" and Czech rýt, “to engrave, dig”.
#germanic #romance #english

If today is the first of Ramadan, why was the first Taraweeh prayer done yesterday?

For a lot of people, including myself, the next day begins at midnight. The clock makes it to 00:00 and the calendar increments the day counter. More than being reasonable, this is a familiar concept.

In Swahili, however, the next day begins at the sunrise, which in my humble opinion, makes a lot of sense.

And in Islamic and Jewish calendar, the new day begins right after the previous ended, at the sunset.

That's why the first of Ramadan began yesterday evening and the first Taraweeh took place.
#swahili #arabic

Imagine fierce, unforgiving weather. Severe warnings of harsh times coming to us. The air is biting and cold, with a sharp edge that stings exposed skin. The wind howls relentlessly, carrying fine, icy particles that whip through the air. Snow falls heavily and persistently.

This adjective of "severe, fierce and harsh" is the same word that Belarusians (люты), Poles (luty) and Ukrainians (лютий) use to name February.
#belarusian #polish #ukrainian

When asked about memorable TV ads, if you watched Russian TV in the 90s, chances are you will mention the slogans like:

– Хлеб и Рама - созданы друг для друга (Rama margarine)
– Галина Бланка, буль-буль, буль-буль (Gallina Blanca bouillon cubes)

After 1991 in Fairy launched an ad campaign, its market share sky-rocketed from 6% to 40% in Spain, due to the iconic towns of Villarriba y Villabajo. Their names consist of the words "villa" for town, "arriba" for up and abajo for down (not to confuse with uptown and downtown). They got so popular that the campaign got renewed over the years and was replicated in the UK, Germany, Portugal, Greece and Russia. Eventually, Villarriba y Villabajo inspired the creation of a 25-episode comedy TV series under the same name.

For whatever reason, but probably because of the χ sound, Villarriba y Villabajo in the Russian version of the were pronounced as if they were English words, notably the "j", which was pronounced as dʒ (like g in giant), instead of χ (like ch in Scottish loch). So, to all who speak Russian out there who wonder how it should have sounded, it's not "Вилларибо и Виллабаджо" but rather "Бийярриба и Бийябахо".
#russian #spanish

It was in the summer after I finished my first year of university in Turkey. I was listening to a Turkish pop-rock band "pinhani" and one of their songs was particularly catchy, it was called "Beni al" (take me). It was at this moment I realized that one of my favorite chocolate bars, Albeni (everybody pronounced it with a soft L and the stress on the second syllable), didn't have just a nice sounding collection of vowels and consonants, but actually had a name that meant "take me". It would have been so much more obvious, if we would have been placing the stress on the last syllable.
#turkish

Formally, capital letters are called majuscule – they usually have the same height. Small letters are minuscule – they usually have ascenders (like in b) or descenders (like in q). The names uppercase and lowercase come from traditional printing. The letters to press were kept in drawers (cases) sorted by the popularity and the most commonly used ones, minuscules, were closer to the operator, in the lower case. That’s the reason we call them uppercase and lowercase. It was literally a case.

By the way, minuscule is often spelled miniscule, by association with the unrelated word miniature and the prefix mini-. This has traditionally been regarded as a spelling mistake (since minuscule is derived from the word minus), but is now so common that some dictionaries tend to accept it as a nonstandard spelling.
#english