701
(Re)bracketing
(lemmy.world)
Was slightly mindblown whenl discovered this.
The two parts to the word "helicopter" are not "helil" and "copter", but "helico" meaning spiral, and "pter" meaning one with wings, like pterodactyl.
1044 AM-5Mar 2018 21,200 Retweets 67,241 Lkes
wait WHAT
Aderinthemadscientist: Wait, so... does -copter come "from" helicopter?
108echoes: Yep! This is called rebracketing. Another famous example would be"-burger": the original food item is named after the German city, (Hamburgl+(er], but semantically reinterpreted as (ham]+[burger].
Weirder still Burger is a thing that predates the sandwich, it’s just a citizen in German
You have to differentiate there, Bürger (citizen) is different from Burg (castle) in German, and Hamburg is written without the ü, as it comes from castle, not citizen.
The word for citizen derives from the word for castle though.
Castler King.