Saturday, October 28, 2006

Laughing at Latin

Just a quick note on something that made me laugh. A few days back I posted about the musical notes and how "C" was once called ut because of an ancient hymn to St. John the Baptist.

You may know that ut is a Latin conjunction meaning "that" or "as" or "in order that" and several other things. Well, I happened to remember that there are other Latin conjunctions which are very similar:

at = "but"
et = "and"
ut = "that"

then I remembered that the irregular verb eo, ire = "to go" has:

it = "he, she, it goes"

But no (alas) there is no Latin word ot.

There is, however, in English. Oh, yes. On a summer day in London one might hear: "Blimey, it's 'ot today." Hee hee.

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