Grand Unified Theory

António Pedro Marques · 25 Aug 2010, 15:28 · from 2010-August.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: entonio at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?B?QW50w7NuaW8gUGVkcm8gTWFycXVlcw==?=)
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:28:17 +0100
Subject: (urth) Grand Unified Theory
In-Reply-To: <4C752BA3.5010103 at gmail.com>
References: <SNT123-W15E8699921C55C8728319CCF840 at phx.gbl>
	<4C752BA3.5010103 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4C753691.7090403 at gmail.com>

James Wynn wrote (25-08-2010 15:41):

> The word "typhoon" comes from "Typhon" -- not that it would prevent
> Wolfe from associating the two anyway if he wanted to.

That's actually open to question.
- _Typhon_ is an english spelling pronunciation of greek <tu'fwn>, which 
would be more or less 'two FAWN' [tu'fO:n] if read 'correctly'.
- _typhoon_ is an english transcription of [tai'fun], from some language 
spoken along the margins of the Indic ocean.

Even if one posits that [tai'fun] is ultimately from the greek, one still 
would have to explain how did greek [tu] become [tai]. The english [ai] is 
merely from the english great vowel shift compounded with a misreading of 
greek <y> as [i], which it never was. Had english gotten the word by natural 
borrowing, rather than in misread written form centuries after, it wouldn't 
have [ai].

Not impossible, but unlikely.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net