Interesting Words (moved from Games)

Pacifica

Pacifica

grammaticissima
Staff member
The Arabic words for grammatical subject and object are فاعل and مفعول, fāʿil- and mafʿūl-, literally the doing and the done or the affecting and the affected. What better names could there be? Surely some other languages have similar terms?
 
Pacifica

Pacifica

grammaticissima
Staff member
Hemo Rusticus

Hemo Rusticus

Jive Turkey
Pacifica dixit:
The Arabic words for grammatical subject and object are فاعل and مفعول, fāʿil- and mafʿūl-, literally the doing and the done or the affecting and the affected. What better names could there be? Surely some other languages have similar terms?
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Sanskrit grammar has something similar, but I can't remember the words. I'm probably thinking of 'active' parasmaipada (= alii-verbum) and 'passive' atmanepada (ipsi-verbum), dative-nominative compounds.

Unrelated:
Chinese 好 hǎo 'good, well; be fond of' is thought to be the radicals for 'female' and 'child', as in the relationship of mother and child. Kinda sweet, if true.
 
Pacifica

Pacifica

grammaticissima
Staff member

فلان - Wiktionary

en.wiktionary.org en.wiktionary.org

I'm curious about this word's etymology, but it doesn't seem to be known. I found a wild discussion about it here (tl;dr: someone claimed it was a Greek borrowing without stating which Greek word it was supposed to be from; others said it might be from Egyptian, Akkadian or other exotic stuff — at the end of the day, nothing remotely conclusive).

It was borrowed into Spanish and Portuguese as Fulano (earlier Foão in Portuguese, displaced by the Spanish version).
 
Pacifica

Pacifica

grammaticissima
Staff member
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