Thursday, January 15, 2009

Give me more Moors with walls

Sometimes I wonder about words. (Which actually is not my job. People pay me to find the right words and forge them into genius headlines. Or copies. Or tv commercials. So please don’t tell anybody.) Where was I? Ah, yes. The wonder of words. Sometimes I stumble upon a word, it gets me thinking and I can’t stop until I have found out where it came from, what it means in Urdu and how people used to spell it in the 16th century. My last wonder word was „more“ (which - by the way - sometimes is „nose“ when you type it into your cell phone). More. The funny thing about „more“ is, that it means „sea“ in Russian. (As in „Cornoje More“ – Black Sea for example.) Now: the English „sea“ in German is „Meer“, in French it is „mer“, which sounds a lot like „mehr“, which means „more“ in German. And then „more“ has a pronunciation very similar to the German „Moor“ which means marsh or swamp. Of course „Moor“ also is the old name for people from Mauretania („maurus“), who had a darker skin than most Europeans and were therefore called blacks („mauros“). Maurus reminds me of the German „Mauer“ which means „wall“ in English. But: If you use the German word „Wall“ nowadays, it rather means „rampart“ than „wall“. And then there is another word for „wall“ in German. It’s „Wand“. Do you understand what I mean? It’s so hard to stop this!

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