Re: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs?

Andrzej Popielewicz scripsit: Not surprising. Puns in other languages are often hard to appreciate. Well, the joke is rather less funny after 30 years than when I first saw it. Also not surprising. English is full of unrelated words pronounced exactly alike, at least partly because of its habit of borrowing words from foreign languages as they are written and then changing the pronunciation to suit itself, which accounts for the strange English pronunciation of "eunuch" (of Classical Greek origin). English has always had an appetite for borrowed words, ever since we replaced huge amounts of our native vocabulary with borrowed French, Latin, and Greek words. (From Polish, not so much, except for the names of specifically Polish things such as "babka", "ogonek", "pierogi" (more usually "pierogies", with an English plural ending added), "Sejm", and "zloty".) (There is, however, just to get *completely* off-topic, the curious case of the English word "spruce", which means any of various coniferous evergreen trees of the genus _Picea_. Most of this word is unquestionably from "Pruce", the older English name for Prussia, now obsolete. But Wikipedia suggests, perhaps rightly, that the initial s- comes from a misinterpretation of the Polish phrase _z Prus_ 'from Prussia'. English dictionaries are not conclusive.) A question for any francophones on the list: is the final -x in "Unix" normally pronounced in French, or is it silent? -- John Cowan cowan(a)ccil.org http://ccil.org/~cowan Big as a house, much bigger than a house, it looked to [Sam], a grey-clad moving hill. Fear and wonder, maybe, enlarged him in the hobbit's eyes, but the Mumak of Harad was indeed a beast of vast bulk, and the like of him does not walk now in Middle-earth; his kin that live still in latter days are but memories of his girth and his majesty. --"Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit"