This is via MeFi, and I’m just going to reproduce growabrain’s wording there because I can’t improve on it:
In Every Language collects images that different language versions of Wikipedia use to illustrate concepts. Refresh to see more.
It was created by Riley Walz. (wiki)
A couple to get you started: house, street. It’s interesting to see which articles use images from their own culture and which fetch them from elsewhere (e.g., the Japanese “street” image shows Wall Street).
Oh, and when I clicked on the Persian “street” article I chose the Google Translate option, and I thought I’d reproduce what it did with the etymology section:
Theology of the word
The word street is two parts of Khi and Aban Persian. The word “Khi” is one of the roots of two Persian words, chid and musk. ۳]
The word “wrough” in Middle Persian is (*xīg, *xēg, leather bag) of Mazandarani (xek). With the old Scandinavian kagi (Bashkeh) the doppelganger. And the word “worn” is from the root of the word Persian pig. ۴]
The “house” example, at least, is a bit misleading, since the opening illustration for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House is a composite of twelve images captioned “Various examples of houses throughout the world, in different styles”. The one shown at “In Every Language” (which I might have used for “Landscape”) is at the top left.
Yeah, that kind of thing is inevitable when you’re automating something like this. Some curation might help.
No picture, alas:
https://kus.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yir
However, you can see examples of our characteristic wattle-and-daub Welsh dwellings here:
https://cy.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%B7
There’s a road in Yokohama called Nihon-Ōdōri, which is the first western style street in Japan, designed by a British engineer in 1870. Popular with local tourists. So in that sense, treating street as a western concept kind of makes sense.
However, you can see examples of our characteristic wattle-and-daub Welsh dwellings here:
The most prominent pic is also used to illustrate French maison, and immediately looked out-of-place in either to me. Furthermore it has a Stars-And-Stripes on a flagpole in the front garden. “Ranch style home in North Salinas, California”. (Also used to illustrate Ukrainian, Arabic, Chechen, Belarussian, …, Esperanto, Interlingua!!) The place that pic _isn’t_ used is for the English ‘house’ article. And indeed in that pastiche, there’s several buildings I wouldn’t call ‘house’ at all.
The Scottish Gaelic pic (which does look plausible) also re-used in a bunch of implausible places.
So this is telling us … that wikipedia is unreliable???
@Ook: So in that sense, treating street as a western concept kind of makes sense.
Indeed, the Japanese article that uses that image of Wall Street shows signs of being about the English word “street”, so I put the title into Google Translate and did get “Sutorīto”.
The Old Library at Trinity College Dublin is shown for “library” in Serbo-Croatian, but not in Serbian or Croatian (or English or Irish, of course).
Per Wikipedia, the creator is an “internet artist”, not an “internet sociolinguistic data analyst”.
I must say that the picture on the Kusaal WP page for dɔɔg “hut, room” looks just a trifle unAfrican. It’s subtle, but …
https://kus.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C9%94%C9%94g
Are you telling us that Kusaasi rooms don’t have tatami, sliding doors, and Buddhist paintings? I am disappoint!
Are you telling us that Kusaasi rooms don’t have tatami, sliding doors, and Buddhist paintings?
I would say that probably under half of them do.
I challenge everyone to guess the 3 last photos of Russian wiki page on housing (rather pompously named Жилище (dwelling)). The answers are below upside down.
llᴉɥʇuɐ uɐ ɟo uoᴉʇɔǝs-ssoɹɔ ‘sʞɔᴉɥɔ ɥʇᴉʍ ʍolloɥ ǝǝɹʇ ‘ǝloɥ ʇᴉqqɐɹ
The German wikipedia shows an actual German house in a traditional style. If not selecting something more modern, I would probably have gone for a less regionally limited style (like a Fachwerkhaus), but in the end, every choice wouldn’t have been typical for the whole of the German-speaking area.
Kölsch is “Colognian”??
Hebrew Wiktionary illustrates בַּיִת ‘house’ with a photo of the Lubavitcher rebbe’s brownstone in Crown Heights.
Kölsch is “Colognian”??
Where does that come from?
Kölsch is “Colognian”??
Where does that come from?
Now the site features rings, and I discovered that Mordor must be in South Azerbaijan. 😉
At the linked ‘house’ page.
Hebrew Wiktionary illustrates בַּיִת ‘house’ with a photo of the Lubavitcher rebbe’s brownstone in Crown Heights.
That gave me a good laugh. (No offense to Lubavitchers — I love the hats!)
Oops, I meant the “street” page.
The Scottish Gaelic pic (which does look plausible) also re-used in a bunch of implausible places.
The only picture I can see on https://gd.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taigh is labelled ‘English houses’ – am I looking in the wrong place?
(They do seem to be – you don’t get much bare brick in Scotland, and roofs tend to be red tile or slate.)
The Portuguese street appears to be in Pompeii!
@Y: Although a commenter on the talk page criticized the naming, the name is still unchanged:
Starting with the title! The dialect of Cologne is Colonian, with no g. Wegesrand (talk) 18:36, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
> you can see examples of our characteristic wattle-and-daub Welsh dwellings here:
>https://cy.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%B7
The hobbit house shown, in Betws-y-Coed, is about what I expected. I then followed the link to the town, and though it’s in Welsh, the standard wiki format helped me understand. For instance,you can tell that Poblogaeth must mean ppoulation, and so you learn that Betws-y-Coed has a population of 564,477,534.
Knowing something about Wales, I recognize something is off. None of their towns have more than 500 million people. But it’s plausible for sheep headcount. Yan, tan, tethera…
The Japanese page is about 英語圏で用いられている市街地の中を走る道路区分の一種 (a type of road classification used in English-speaking countries for roads running through urban areas), so it is not really equivalent to the English page in the intended way, I think.
Words have connotations that don’t map one-to-one between languages. Expecting a language switch in Wikipedia to handle that gracefully is a lost cause.
The town of Betws-y-Coed was formed when the formerly independent Betws, Y and Coed were merged by wicked English authorities. Separate census figures are given for the three former settlements. English Wikipedia provides only the figure for Y and does so erroneously, justifying the error with the dubious and un-Welsh principle that “imaginary and recently deceased persons are not to be included; only such human persons that are neither imaginary nor recently deceased. Those who are deceased in a non-recent manner must also, of course, be excluded from the count.”
Betws-y-Coed has a population of 564,477,534.
564 is the population as given in the 2011 census, and 534 as in the 2001 census.
The English page gives the 2021 census number as 476, which is close to the middle number, but I don’t know why it would be in the middle. And I don’t think anything explains that that’s what they’re doing.
The actual Welsh text says Mae gan y pentref boblogaeth o 1,187 (Cyfrifiad 2001) “The village has a population of 1,187 (Census 2001.)”
What are they trying to hide? Are these secretly assembled Plaid Cymru shock troops, training for the day when Prydain will once again be free?
Pronounced “Betsy Co-ed” by English people in my experience, which is rather magnificent in its own way.
Hey, I was just trying to craft a spontaneous joke on that.
The village has a population of 1,187 (Census 2001.)
That appears to be the population of the ‘electoral ward’ with the same name, if English wikipedia is to be believed (it was 1244 in 2011, anyway). Of course, the English may have reasons to lie about this…
Pronounced “Betsy Co-ed” by English people
When I was visiting friends in the area some years ago, the (American) voice of Google maps on my phone came up with “Bet Wiss Why Co-ed.” I knew what she meant, which is the important thing.
Hey: betws is a loan from English! Can’t these Saxons even pronounce their own language right?
@D.E.: You should hear us try to pronounce Cnicht. We knew how to do it once.
The Hebrew street looks like Buenos Aires to me.
You are correct, sir. The photos in the Hebrew article show various something-est streets in the world, and if I knew more Hebrew, I could tell you what the somethings are. (An interesting approach, illustrating the article with extremely atypical examples.)
Those who are deceased in a non-recent manner must also, of course, be excluded from the count.
this seems particularly problematic! excluding the recently deceased makes sense – they are in transit, so cannot be said to be properly in residence. but once properly settled in, surely mere death is no reason to deny their settled presence. what perversions of bureaucracy hath the Norman Yoke wrought!
The town of Betws-y-Coed was formed when the formerly independent Betws, Y and Coed were merged by wicked English authorities.
Obviously a conspiracy to deprive me of my estates.
We are the cnichts who say cnicht!
The photos in the Hebrew article show various something-est streets in the world
Avenida 9 de Julio (BA), widest, Yonge St. (Toronto), longest, Spreuerhofstraße (Reutlingen), narrowest, Ebenezer Place (Wick, Scotland), shortest.
@Y
> Kölsch is “Colognian”??
What else would you call it in English? 😉 Or do you mean you didn’t know that Eau de Cologne is from Köln?
Cologne dialect.
It’s properly called Kölnisch Wasser. Or simply 4711.
What else would you call it in English?
If I had to form an adjective I’d go for “Colognese” rather than “Colognian”. But I agree that just “Cologne dialect” works.
I’m not a good one to ask because I never call the city Cologne, only Köln. I call the language Kölsch, as others call the beer.
surely mere death is no reason to deny their settled presence
This is the Kusaasi position. “Hey, you may be dead, but you’re still family.”
Seems to be general in the cultural zone:
https://lexikos.journals.ac.za/pub/article/download/1026/542
As Naden says, a person says “I’m giving a drink to my grandfather” in exactly the same way when talking about a live grandfather, or doing what we would interpret as pouring a libation to the manes of a deceased forebear.
[I didn’t come across this article until years after I’d left Ghana, and was very struck with how closely it reflected my own experiences with the Kusaasi. A minor quibble is that Naden has missed some significant points about “fairies”, but he is spot-on about the whole business of importing our own categories and concepts of “religion” and “magic” into descriptions of cultures where they are question-begging at best.]
Thanks for filling in the superlatives, Y!
The Russian word for “street” úlitsa is one of those disturbing words where the root (ul) is easily extractable, recognisable and hard to confuse with other roots, but only employed in a couple of words, the other being úlej “hive”.
Could be a borrowing, but Wiktionary says (*h₂ewlós) it’s IE. However, it seems uncommon within IE as well.
@Hans, I frequtenly complain that some people seem to think that Iran is Mordor (dangerous to travel and possibly full of orcs). But its orography does recemble that of Mordor, and so does the relief of Southern Azerbaijan. As a Russian, I doubt, however, that a place blessed with Хуӣ can be bad.
🙂
But its orography does recemble that of Mordor, and so does the relief of Southern Azerbaijan.
Hmm. That’s a surprisingly good fit actually!
Though AFAICT for the best fit you’d need to turn it 90 degrees, which would put Barad-Dur in Ardabil, and Mount Doom in the prominent (but extinct) stratovolcano of Sabalan.
(You’d also get a decent fit between the Misty Mountains and the eastern Caucasus chain, but the rest of the geography isn’t that close. Still, I wonder if Tolkien could have actually based it on a map of that area.)
Looked up “sink”. Every single image was of what I would call a “wash basin”. (The English-language article actually starts: “A sink (also known as basin in the UK)”.
Looked up “wash basin”. For the English-language article, it showed exactly the same image as at “sink”. But for every other language, it showed what I might call a “tub”.
Not totally sure what is going on.
I think that sink encompasses both the basin and the tap(s), although the focus may be more on the former. In the sink certainly means in the basin, not the tap piping.
@Bathrobe: Out of curiosity, what does “sink” mean to you?
You’d call these tubs? Bathtubs?
(I got there by going to “Wash basin” and clicking on German; it links to “Sink”. The literal translation is “wash basin”.)
Out of curiosity, what does “sink” mean to you?
A “sink” is the thing you find in the kitchen. A “basin” is what you find in a bathroom.
You’d call these tubs? Bathtubs?
For “wash basin”, In Every Language mostly shows simple plastic tubs. The sort of thing known as төмпөн in Mongolian or 洗面器 (not 洗面台!) in Japanese. I’m not sure why it shows these as “wash basin”, given that a search for “wash basin” in English Wikipedia sends you directly to the article on “sink”!
(Incidentally, the Japanese article on 洗面器 starts with a section on plastic tubs, then has another section on 取付用洗面器 — fixed wash basins — which, it says, are often known as 洗面台, 化粧台, or 洗面所 (the latter can also refer to the room as a whole).
The Japanese word I would equate to “kitchen sink” is 流し台, but this doesn’t even link to an English-language article!
Like I said, I found the whole thing confusing.
Clarifications:
1. The Japanese word I would equate to “kitchen sink” is 流し台, but the Wikipedia article on 流し台 doesn’t even link to an English-language article!
2. The Japanese article on 洗面器 starts with a section on plastic tubs, which is what I would call 洗面器 in Japanese.
It then has a second section on 取付用洗面器 — fixed wash basins. For me personally (not a native speaker), 洗面器 would not immediately bring to mind wash basins in a bathroom. The terms 洗面台, 化粧台, or 洗面所 seem to me more appropriate for wash basins (or sinks, if you like) in the bathroom.
Note, however, that my Japanese is already antiquated. I was recently told by a Japanese speaker I met that the Japanese words 奥さん okusan (your/his wife) and 家内 kanai (my wife) are no longer in use.
A “sink” is the thing you find in the kitchen. A “basin” is what you find in a bathroom.
Ah, thanks.
I was recently told by a Japanese speaker I met that the Japanese words 奥さん okusan (your/his wife) and 家内 kanai (my wife) are no longer in use.
!
Thanks, that’s a useful reminder of how antiquated I am.
> 奥さん okusan (your/his wife) and 家内 kanai (my wife) are no longer in use.
Whaaa? 奥さん is very alive and well, in spite of its sexist origins (“oku” means “(in the) back”). Unfortunately, no good replacements exist.
My grandfather used 家内 about my grandmother, but indeed I do not hear it much anymore. As for replacements, 妻 tsuma works, but sounds a bit stiff in casual conversation. What I hear the most is (うちの)奥さん, (uchi-no) okusan, breaking the modest speech / respectful speech wall, which is quite common in polite, but casual speech.
“(in the) back”
Reminds me Russian выйти замуж “to marry (about a woman)”, literally “to go out behind man”. However за “behind, beyond” has numerous abstract meanings, say, it translates “for” in “to stand for…”, “to be glad for someone” etc. Which in turn reminds me English “to back”.
взять в жёны “to marry (about a man)”, literally “to take as a wife”, more literally “to take into wives” (but “into Xes” means “as an X”) intuitively sounds more sexist. Or maybe it wasn’t if “take” meant “accept”?
Anyway, it has been replaced with жениться “to wife oneself”.
@drasvi
Might vyiti zamuzh be more about exogamy, i.e., leave home and join the man’s family (i.e., for/on account of a man’) than about walking behind?
It’s definitely not about walking behind, and I don’t think drasvi was implying that, just explaining the literal sense of за.
In Kusaal, “marry” (of a woman, marrying a man”) is kul “go home.” Presumably this started out as an idiom “go home to (a man)” but in this use it’s just straightforwardly transitive now. (Though, as direct and indirect objects are formally indistinguishable in Kusaal, you need to resort to fairly subtle syntactic arguments to decide this kind of question. Kusaal doesn’t have morphologically derived applicatives, unlike Bantu languages like Swahili.)
Kusaal also has ɛl for this meaning, which continues the usual Oti-Volta etymon, but although the dictionary has several examples from texts (none of them from the Bible versions), I never heard it in Real Life. A derivative turns up in pu’a-ɛliŋ “fiancée”, though.
“Marry” for a man marrying a woman is di “eat” (in its common metaphorical sense of “get something, which is thenceforward closely associated with you personally.”)
I call a sink a sink regardless of what room it’s in. The plastic thing you put into the kitchen sink if you don’t want your cutlery to clatter about is a basin, but I don’t really have one.
PP, I think my “go behind” is a bad literal translation. Even as an interlitenear gloss.
We say “to go behind the corner” in the sense of “to go around the corner”. To-behind.
За also means “beyond” and “beyond” can be used this way in English as well.
“Going” makes me think of exogamy too. I wonder, what are connotations of the Japanese word.
In the enjoyable UK TV series “Minder”, said minder’s somewhat disreputable employer always referred to his own wife (who was never seen) as “‘er indoors.”
That “kitchen sink” is a notably more common phrase in AmEng than “bathroom sink” seems like at least some evidence that the one in the bathroom is the unmarked one?*
There’s also (at least in AmEng) the “utility sink,” which is sufficiently different that it feels a bit off to me to refer to it with bare “sink”.
(The Lowe’s website explains for non-initiates: “A utility sink is a large and deep sink that can tackle various household tasks. It’s usually installed in laundry rooms, mudrooms, garages or basements and can handle tasks that are too messy for a normal sink. Utility sinks can be used to clean paintbrushes and garden tools, wash off dirty shoes, fill and empty mop buckets and hand-wash or soak stained clothing.”)
*Actually, there are two sinks in our kitchen, but I feel like one of them is THE kitchen sink and the other one isn’t.
“eat”
assimilate:)
I’ve never seen Minder. Since a lot of old British television shows are online now, I’ve seen all of both The Sweeny and New Tricks,* but Dennis Waterman was not my favorite character in either of those programs. So I have never been particularly inclined to watch Minder.
* I have noted before that New Tricks had a lot of pop culture references, particularly to the main characters’ previous roles and personal lives. As I see more shows from the 1970s and 1980s, I notice more and more of these allusions, and if I rewatched New Tricks somewhere down the line, I imagine I would pick up on a lot more than I did the first time.
The plastic thing you put into the kitchen sink if you don’t want your cutlery to clatter about is a basin
I call that a (washing-up) bowl, even if it’s rectangular and therefore not bowl-shaped.
Late-20C Irish usage:
A [wash] [hand] basin is always for washing one’s hands, and usually also for facial ablutions and hence in front of a mirror; prototypically porcelain and in a private bathroom or public restroom, but sometimes found in bedrooms with built-in wardrobe–vanity units, or in the corner of a bedroom in very cheap lodgings, where the shared bathroom is outside along the corridor.
A sink is designed for handwashing of things, not washing of hands, though you may well find yourself doing the latter there as well. It’s more robust and larger than a w.h.b. and often of metal, though the “Belfast sink” for one is ceramic. Prototypically in kitchens, but also in workshops, laboratories, etc., so “kitchen sink” is by no means redundant.
Die Abwasch is the kitchen sink (always actually two basins; metal), der Abwasch is what you do in it – except I don’t know if these two words even overlap geographically.
I like that.
die Abwasch
Doesn’t exist in my dialect and I can’t remember having encountered it even once written or spoken. Der Abwasch is an everyday word.
The basin you wash dishes in is die Spüle oder das Spülbecken, the basin you wash your hands etc in is das Waschbecken.
The same here. The Duden Deutsches Universalwörterbuch labels it as österr..
Ah yes, so the two Abwasch may not overlap at all (instead of den Abwasch machen we just say abwaschen or (das) Geschirr abwaschen). Agreed on Waschbecken, but that includes utility sinks.
(Including those in chemistry halls at schools & universities, where you get unpredictable Waschbeckenreaktionen based on what you pour in and what was previously poured in.)
@DM, that’s what I thought when I first saw one in the school chemistry room (“wait, is this where we’re going to pour all our acids and God knows what else?”), but I never heard anyone talking about it… until today.
Spüle seems to be etymologically interesting (Becken too)
How do you call this in English?
(used in USSR for 1. washing clothes 2. cooking varen’je)
They’re large. Those I remember are maybe 70cm wide or something like that (those in the pictures are smaller).
Did your chemistry teacher not regale you with tales of the most spectacular accidents?
In German that was a bowl: Waschschüssel.
She did not:(
She even refused to give us crystallic iodine:( “I know, you want to make NI₃”
“Waschschüssel” thanks!
It was traditional in our school to put lithium in the sinks in the toilets.
The effect is satisfying, but brief.
In retrospect, the authorities should probably have intervened in some way. But it made us the men we are today.
@drasvi How do you call this in English?
Good question … tricky. I’m excluding the wok, the cast-iron cookware, the pail, the ones with lids.
Enamelled tinware I [BrE] incline towards ‘basin’. But the decorated ones are more ‘bowl’. If I had to use one word for all, I think ‘bowl’, but I could roll with either.
I call that a (washing-up) bowl, even if it’s rectangular and therefore not bowl-shaped.
I don’t expect ‘bowl’ to be round necessarily — well, roundish corners, I suppose. A round washing-up bowl in a rectangular sink I call a darned nuisance.
I think we made it in school, as a scheduled part of a lesson. In any case we made iodoform (CHI₃, dentist aroma).
soak paper towels in homebrewed tear gas (just brominate anything), take them out of the lesson and place them strategically.
The most memorable chemistry-lesson sabotage from my schooldays was when someone worked out how to fill the gas main with water, so that the Bunsen burners sprayed fountains of water when turned on.
It is not for nothing that Scotland has had a high reputation for the production of engineers.
With hindsight, again, I suppose we were a bit feral. I expect it was the result of the prefects wearing kilts.
We reduced mercury compounds to elemental metal, but only in minuscule quantities.
“as a scheduled part of a lesson” – that makes sense (as I thought back then).
Removing everything spectacular from the curriculum does not:)
However, students of the chemical faculty of Moscow University supply students of other faculties with amphetamines* (and also sometimes make bombs and blow up things in the dormitory:))
Still, maybe they behave so exactly because their lessons are too boring?
* I knew about that, but my friends would not consume those. Later I met a girl – I mean a child – with somewhat different background than mine and when she went to the university to my shock for her circle it became the norm to use amphetamines when preparing to exams:/
As a schoolgirl she too told similarly illuminating things about her school. Somewhat less shocking for me (I don’t find sex and alcohol shocking).
In German that was a bowl: Waschschüssel.
Still is 🙂 I mean, I’ve seen people soaking a couple of pieces of clothing they want to hand-wash in bowls like this because they didn’t want to block the washbasin for everybody else.
Like in Russia, these bowls can be used for both washing and food preparation (my grandma and my mum used them when they had to prepare salad for larger companies). I personally associate the enameled versions with food preparation, while the plastic ones can be used both ways.
BrE and AmE have different vocabulary around dishwashing. US “dish soap” = UK “washing-up liquid”, hence the joke US “gasoline” = UK “driving-around liquid”.
How do you call this in English?
Big bowl, salad bowl. If it was specifically for handwashing it might be a washbowl or washtub.
(used in USSR for 1. washing clothes 2. cooking varen’je)
Had to look that up (and avoid a Swedish point-and-click game about a bug picking berries). I’ve had something like that at the best restaurant in my town, which serves Mexican food. It was something they made that day if they had seasonal fruit and gave you a small bowl of as a bonus with your dinner. I think they called it conserves, though possibly preserves. I haven’t been to that place in at least fifteen years, though.
It was traditional in our school to put lithium in the sinks in the toilets.
Potassium probably works at least as well, but that was in college, and, uh, the physics majors who did the lab on the Maxwell velocity distribution should have known better.
What did you have metallic lithium for?
@Hans, there are smaller versions (30cm wide and less but similar in shape) used for food preparation, those are usually called míska*.
Those in the link are subscribed “7” or “10 liters”. I clicked one (10 liters), it is 45cm.
I thought mine is larger, but I measured it.. it is 50 cm. Larger, but not as large as I thought. Called taz. It is usually too large for cooking, however it can be used for varen’je, prepared once in a year, to be stored and eaten during that year. On the stove all 4 burners can be used when you cook in it (though some will only lick its sides).
I think I saw people using smaller ones (perhaps 7 liters?) but never used them personally. I imagine, both washing in it (unlike a miska) and cooking, more often than my large taz.
* Wiktionary says interesting things about miska. Namely, that it is a diminutive form from PS *mìsa from Latin mesa.
Then it urges us to compare it to “Latin discus, whence Russian чан (čan), доска́ (doská), English dish, desk.“. I would NEVER have guessed čan < discus :-/
I would not have guessed miska < mesa as well.
weirdly, when I look at it my mind tries to extract Arabic misk “musk” instead of Slavic ka “feminine nominalising and diminutive suffix found in a good half of Russian nouns”:-).
Maybe that’s because of misyurka – “17th-century helmet, a disk wiht chainmail hanging around it”, perhaps from misr “Egypt”. Which by the way is not unlike a metal taz or miska:)
Lithium in the sinks? Reminds me of the time in undergrad chemistry when the fellow next to me absent-mindedly tossed the contents of a test tube full of molten sodium into a wet (not full) sink. Result: a bang like a drawer being slammed (at first I thought that was what it was, my back being turned just then) and a very embarrassed student with an itchy face from tiny bits of NaOH being driven into it.
My other chemistry story comes from much earlier, when as a boy of maybe ten fiddling around at random with the contents of my chemistry set, I got a wet-looking brick-red stuff with a brick-red vapor hanging over it. I then did the unadvised, of course, and took a big whiff of bromine. It was years before I realized exactly what I’d done.
The sodium drop (1.0 kg of sodium metal off the Longfellow Bridge and into the Charles River) is an annual MIT event, traditionally occurring the weekend before fall classes begin. Having a sufficiently large mass of metal is important to the effect, so that the initial reaction also generates enough heat to ignite the hydrogen gas produced by reducing the water.
Washtubs (large and generally without a horizontal outer lip on the sides, traditional used for washing clothes, or very young family members) falling on characters’ heads is a standard gag in Japanese media, especially anime. In Western cartoons, an anvil would be more typical, but less realistic.
@drasvi: Mizzer is the name of the sand planet in Quest of the Three Worlds. However, “On the Sand Planet,” the part of the fix-up that actually takes place there, is kind of a mess. It was one of the last things Cordwainer Smith wrote, and my father suggested he may have been losing it, although he finished strong with “Under Old Earth,” which is just as weird as “On the Sand Planet” but much better plotted.
That’s all to be found in Vasmer, with much more detail giving it much more plausibility.
Btw, mesa is mensa in Classical Latin, although apparently even Cicero did not pronounce the n.
Yeah, he’d have said /mẽ:sa/. (The Latin spelling is based on Kusaal orthography.)
It helps to know that чан is shortened from дъщанъ.
The sodium drop (1.0 kg of sodium metal off the Longfellow Bridge and into the Charles River) is an annual MIT event, traditionally occurring the weekend before fall classes begin.
Still, although in September 2007 volunteers cleaning up the river shore were injured by what appeared to be sodium that had gotten onto the shore?
It’s not clear from Wikipedia whether it still happens, but apparently it is (or was) not annual but “sporadic.”
A pound of sodium metal in the river (YouTube).
@ulr, of course, but
1. Wiktionary is convenient. It can be messy (Russian wiktionary transaltes Spüle as spool which is die Spule – did someone use a script that ignores diacritics!?), but it is full of interesting clickable links.
For both *mìsa and *čan Vasmer is linked too. And Vasmer ми́са doesn’t even mention *čan.
2. mesa is still Latin, but if I were more pedantic and mentioned the varfiation I wouldn’t have learned from you about Cicero:-)
A friend of mine in middle school decided to mix vinegar and calcium carbonate from his chemistry set and put a lit match into the evolved gas to watch it go out. However, he used the calcium carbide from the set instead and got acetylene instead of carbon dioxide. He wasn’t hurt.
Speaking of bromine gas, in high school chemistry we did an experiment mixing some soluble lead compound, maybe the nitrate, with potassium (I think) iodide to get a yellow precipitate of lead iodide. One partnership instead got metallic lead in the bottom of the beaker and iodine vapor coming out. If the teacher or anyone ever figured out how that happened, I never heard about it.
@jf
What about
2Pb(NO3)2 -> 2PbO+ 2NO2+4NO2+O2
(heated test tube, no water)
Then keep heating, add the KI and (basic) tap water, does KI + XOH free up your iodine at some stage? The stuff in the bottom of test tube would be the PbO in this case, not metallic lead.
Given its place in the periodic table metallic aluminium would be expected to be highly reactive, but it isn’t, to the extent that kitchen utensils are often made of it. The reason is that it instantly becomes coated with aluminium oxide, which protects it from further oxidation. However, if you rub a little mercury sulphate on a piece of metallic aluminium enough metallic mercury is produced to form a mercury-aluminium alloy, which reacts readily with oxygen to make the oxide and regenerate enough metallic mercury to restart the process.
It so happened that when I learned about this in a chemistry class there was a boy that I knew who was making a ball out of “silver paper” wrapping on chocolates, which had reached about the size of a golf ball. I rubbed a little mercury sulphate on a part of it when he wasn’t there, and after a few hours there was a little heap of white powder next to it. He wasn’t pleased, but I don’t remember if he knew that I was the guilty person or how I had done it. This is probably the first time I’ve thought about that incident in well over half a century.
We weren’t supposed to play with mercury in chemistry laboratories, but of course we did. On one occasion I immersed a silver dollar that someone had given me in mercury, and it became very shiny. At that time one could still find silver dollars in Las Vegas, though they were very little used elsewhere.
Mephedrone? I recently watched a documentary about that.
The reactivity of alkali metals increases with Z. Quoth the teacher: “If you throw lithium on water, it hisses; if you throw sodium on water, it hisses and bangs;” and so on; “if you throw cesium on water, it goes überhaupt rumm-tschumm-wumm; – francium you can’t throw on water. <dramatic pause> The moment you lift it, it’s gone. – It’s radioactive.”
Doesn’t math.
Also, if you get NO2, there’s no way you don’t notice. It’s deep red-brown.
It seems difficult to see how you could both reduce the lead and oxidize the iodine without an electric current. One reaction or the other would be relatively fairly straightforward, but not both together.
When I was doing an independent study version of Advanced Placement Chemistry as a high school senior, one of the labs I found to do involved subjecting copper to a whole bunch of reactions and seeing how much of the original metal I could regenerate at the end. Treating a piece of copper wire with concentrated nitric acid made copper (II) nitrate. Adding sodium hydroxide changed it to copper (II) hydroxide. I heated it to covert it is copper (II) oxide. Then sulfuric acid made the beautiful blue copper (II) sulfate. Finally, I added enough metallic zinc to reduce replace the copper. Since copper doesn’t react much with hydrochloric acid, I used just slightly more than enough zinc to precipitate out the copper metal, then added the hydrochloric to dissolve the excess zinc. I think it was this last stage where I lost most of the thirteen percent of the copper that I didn’t get back at the end, since it’s not easy to have all zinc and only zinc in the final solution.