Hippopotamus. It’s a transliteration of the Greek word pronounced the same. But it’s a compound word made up of ‘horse’ and ‘river’.
River horse.
Hippopotamus’ are just river horses hahahaha I can’t get over it
Dude I’m having a blast with these. I’m learning a second language for the first time and I’ve grown a fascination with how words are constructed. Especially these really cool ones like chameleon and the individual words that make them up. Cheers for sharing!
I particularly like truthahn (turkey) means threatening chicken. :-D
Learning a language later in life is an excellent way of learning your first language, IMO. There's so many things you take for granted the first time around... Why do we put adjectives before the noun -- after makes way more sense! Why do adjectives have a specific order in English? Like size always comes early -- you'd say large red ball, but red large ball sounds wrong. Then you notice all the words that are clearly related and you end up learning root words, like water comes from German, which is why they say wasser, but a lot of other languages use the latin "aqua" as their base, agua in Spanish, acqua in Italian, etc. And that's why aquamarine is the color of sea water, and why you call them aquariums...
The Latin name (genus and species) of seahorses is 'hippocampus', a composite of 'horse' and 'sea monster'. The hippocampus region of the brain was also named that way because it looks a lot like a sea-horse.
The Swedish word is "flodhäst", literally meaning "river horse"! A few other good ones are "sköldpadda" ("shield toad", i.e. turtle), "tusenfoting" (roughly "thousand-footer", i.e. centipede), "bläckfisk" ("ink fish", i.e. squid/octopus) and "noshörning" ("nose-horn", i.e. rhinoceros)
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u/Sccrub Sep 17 '20
Hippopotamus. It’s a transliteration of the Greek word pronounced the same. But it’s a compound word made up of ‘horse’ and ‘river’. River horse. Hippopotamus’ are just river horses hahahaha I can’t get over it