Mertcan Bulak
@MBulak
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Ağustos 2020 tarihinde katıldı
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Slowly, people had to start distinguishing the old Latin from the language that people were speaking on the streets of Rome, which came to be known as Romanicus .
The Dark Ages darkened and the difference between Latin and Romanicus grew larger and larger. Latin was preserved in a way. Classical Latin, or something very like it, became the language of the Catholic Church and of academic discourse.
Yet in the Middle Ages, most people didn’t want to read books about theoretical theology. They wanted stories about knights in shining armour and beautiful damsels in distress. They wanted fire - breathing dragons, enchanted mountains and fairylands beyond the oceans. So such stories got written by the bucketful, and they were romanice scribere , that is to say they were written in Romanic.
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Italian aristocrats of the nineteenth century didn’t eat pizza. It was peasant food, flavoured with that peasant favourite: garlic. However, in the 1880s, European royalty, wary of revolution, were all trying to be nice to the common men whom they ruled. So when King Umberto and Queen Margherita visited Naples, the home of the pizza, a man named Raffaele Esposito decided to make a pizza fit for the lips of the queen.
Esposito was the owner of the Pizzeria di Pietro e Basta Così, and he got over the garlic problem by simply not using any garlic, an idea that was previously unheard of. He then decided to make the pizza properly patriotic and Italian by modelling it on the colours of the flag: red, white and green. So he added tomatoes for the red (nobody had done this before), mozzarella for the white, and herbs for the green.
There’s a myth that the Earl of Sandwich invented the sandwich. He did not. He had servants and chefs to actually make his food for him. Sandwich simply made sandwiches cool. People have almost certainly been stuffing things between two slices of bread since the stuff was invented around the end of the last ice age. What the Earl of Sandwich did was to take a humble little snack that you wouldn’t think twice about, and give it associations of aristocracy, power, wealth, luxury and 24 - hour gambling.
Columbus was therefore terribly pleased when he landed in Cuba and discovered that the people there called themselves Canibs. At the next island Columbus came to, they told him they were Caribs , and at the island after that they were Calibs . This was because in the old languages of the Caribbean, Ns, Rs and Ls were pretty much interchangeable.
The sea got named the Carib bean after one pronunciation. But it was also believed in Europe that the islanders ate each other, and this gastronomic perversity came, on the basis of another pronunciation, to be called cannibalism.
The Romans found some islands in the Atlantic that were overrun with large dogs. So they called them the Dog Islands or Canaria . However, when the English finally got round to inspecting the Canaria a couple of millennia later, all they found there were birds, which they decided to call canaries , thus changing dogs into birds (and then into a pretty shade of yellow).