Comments | vanitashaze: No sacred place existed without us then; no woodland, no dance, no sound.

vanitashaze

No sacred place existed without us then; no woodland, no dance, no sound.

Feb 17, 2010 22:08

ROMANCE c.1300, "story of a hero's adventures," also (early 14c.), "vernacular language of France" (as opposed to Latin), from O.Fr. romanz "verse narrative," originally an adverb, "in the vernacular language," from V.L. *romanice scribere "to write in a Romance language" (one developed from Latin instead of Frankish), from L. Romanicus "of or in ( Read more... )

the world at large, i am insane, meta

Comments 2

slanted_edges February 18 2010, 04:00:49 UTC

I love thinking about these things, and etymology in particular has always intrigued me. One of the ones I know is "homosexuality" -- which wasn't coined as a term until, I believe, the very late 1800s. The Greeks and Romans? Didn't believe in homosexuality. It didn't exist for them; instead, they believed in homoeroticism and heteroeroticism. The sexual acts could have connotations and orientations but the people who committed them could not. It's practically the exact reverse in our culture, where we seem to have a fetish for labeling things -- anything and everything -- where we love defining ourselves with clear-cut names, in black-and-white terms ( ... )

vanitashaze February 18 2010, 20:31:50 UTC

Etymology = awesome. I'm not too big a fan of linguistics, per se, but I absolutely love etymology.

Uh-huh. Like many other cultures - but unlike our own - the Greeks and Romans differentiated between practice and preference, and didn't necessarily tie the two together, definitely not exclusively. (Neither, interestingly enough, did the old Chinese, which is kind of a headfuck to think about, considering the intense homophobic culture of today. It's amazing how many undesirable elements of what we think of as "foreign" cultures actually came from us.) Though it seems that while they didn't have the word, they had somewhat of the concept - from literature, mostly, we know that they were definitely clear that there were some men who had a strong preference for the same sex - but again, it's a language thing. Labeling people as "men who prefer women" and "men who prefer men" is much less otherizing as labeling people "homosexuals" and (the mostly silent, normalized) "straight people / heterosexuals / normal ( ... )