Mertcan Bulak
@MBulak
1183 okur puanı
Ağustos 2020 tarihinde katıldı
Şu anda okuduğu kitap
Nobody is certain where the word soldier comes from, but the best guess is that it has to do with salt. Salt was infinitely more valuable in the ancient world than it is today. To the Romans, salt was white, tasty gold. Legionaries were given a special stipend just to buy themselves salt and make their food bearable; this was called the salarium and it’s where we get the English word salary , which is really just salt-money . The Roman writer Pliny the Elder therefore went so far as to theorise that soldier itself derived from sal dare , meaning to give salt .
📚🔔 Tatil zili çaldı!
Bir yıl boyunca verilen emeklerin ardından şimdi dinlenme, keşfetme ve yeni maceralara atılma zamanı. 🌞
Bu yaz bol kahkahalı, bol anılı ve elbette bol kitaplı geçsin. Tüm öğrencilere keyifli tatiller diliyoruz! 💙📖
Montalvo called his island California because it was ruled by a beautiful queen called Calafia . In the Exploits of Esplandian , Calafia has been persuaded to bring her army of ferocious (and attractive) women, plus some trained griffins, to fight alongside Muslims and against Christians at the siege of Constantinople. However, Calafia falls in love with Esplandian, is defeated, taken prisoner and converts to Christianity. Then she returns to the island of California with her Spanish husband, and her trained griffins.
There are several theories as to why Montalvo chose the name Calafia , but by far the most convincing is that, as she was fighting alongside Muslims, her name was chosen to suggest or echo the title of the Muslim leader: the Caliph . So California is really, ultimately, etymologically the last surviving Caliphate .
The Greeks believed in a country called Amazonia filled with fierce female warriors that never existed. Then, a couple of thousand years later, an explorer called Francisco de Orellana was attacked by angry women during a voyage up a big South American river, so he called it the Amazon .
The Egyptian mistake has been perpetuated in Hungary, where they were known as Pharaoh-Nepek , or Pharaoh’s people . But different countries have different legends and names, all of which are untrue. In Scandinavia they were thought to be from Tartary and were called the Tatars , in Italy it was Walachia and Walachians . The Spanish believed that the Romany were Flemish Belgians. Why they thought this is something of a mystery. Whatever the reasoning, the Spanish started to call both the Roma and their style of music Flemish, or Flamenco . The French thought that they must come from Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) and called them Bohemians.
In fact, the Roma are not from Egypt but from India. We know this because their language is more closely related to Sanskrit and Hindi than to anything else. The word Roma comes from Rom , their word for man , which derives ultimately from domba , a Sanskrit term for a kind of musician.