[HN Gopher] What's an obelisk, anyway?
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What's an obelisk, anyway?
Author : herodotus
Score : 101 points
Date : 2024-02-18 16:29 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| bookofjoe wrote:
| I honestly thought this was going to be a discussion of the
| Washington Monument.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| It's a big French native from a tribe opposing the rule of Julius
| Caesar of course
| ithkuil wrote:
| Celt. Franks came later from germany
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| Are Gaul and Celt the same? In any case, he also fell in the
| magic potion when he was a kid. Loves wild boars.
| sigzero wrote:
| Yes - The Celts were the people spreading throughout Europe
| during the late Bronze Age and the Iron Age. They spoke the
| Celtic language and shared cultural and religious practices
| and beliefs. The Gauls were the Celtic tribes that settled
| in what the Romans called Gaul.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I did not know that, thanks. And cool!
|
| That explains why they had some typical celtic things
| like druids.
| DylanSp wrote:
| Sorta kinda; "Celt"/"Celtic" is a broad term that's been
| applied to a lot of different peoples, languages, and
| cultures. The history blog ACOUP has a good post on it [1];
| it's long, but only the first part is really relevant to
| what you're asking (up through the table comparing
| different regions).
|
| [1] https://acoup.blog/2023/05/12/collections-who-were-the-
| celts...
| ithkuil wrote:
| The etymology of the word "gaul" is fascinating.
|
| It's an exonym, i.e. it's not how the celts living in
| Gaul would call themselves.
|
| There are two origins of the word that are likely to cave
| coexisted in a "convergent etymology"
|
| 1. The name of an ancient Celtic tribe (one of many)
| sounded like "galatai" to ancient Greeks and it sounded
| about right because of the the white skin (either fair
| skin or white paint). So in this case it ultimately stems
| from a Celtic word.
|
| 2. The old Germanic word "walhaz" meant something like
| "foreign" or "Roman". That originated many names for
| former roman territories when Germanic people encountered
| them. (Similar word for Slavic). That left a lot of names
| like "Wales/welch", "Wallachia", "vlachi". This word went
| through a sound change when adopted in romance languages
| similar to how other words like "werra" - >
| "g(u)err(a|e)", "Ward" - "g(u)ard" ...
|
| The regular sound changes in languages betray the
| coexistence of these two etymologies at different times
| and phases of the Evolution of the romance languages and
| french in particular.
|
| The latin "g" sound evolved into "j" (gamba -> jambe) so
| one our think that if the word "Gallia" was available
| from the latin substrate it would have transformed into
| "Jallia" and in fact it was! As attested by place names
| like La Jaille-Yvon and Saint-Mars-la-Jaille.
|
| This reveals how the modern french name "gaule" likely
| stems from the second etymology (the German origin).
|
| That said, languages are rarely let evolve naturally.
| There is plenty of people who studied languages and kept
| latin alive for centuries and it's also quite possible
| that the version with the "g" sound has been also kept
| reinforced because of the relationship with the classic
| texts (Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres)
| wkat4242 wrote:
| OMG don't tell the French they have German heritage. You will
| not survive it.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Or the Germans that their ancestors also settled in the
| Frankenreich and they should of course be on good terms
| with them!
|
| Or Franken (i.e. parts of Bavaria) that they're Bavarian.
|
| Or English that many of them are part French nowadays
| (think Normans).
|
| Or ...
|
| History is messy. People are messy. Mostly vengefully so
| unfortunately. This is why we can't have nice things.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| The people most likely to threaten your borders are also
| the people you're most likely to share culture and genes
| with. So minor differences in language, culture, and
| geography become important signs of essential distinction
| from your historical enemy.
|
| Freud called this the "narcissism of small differences" (
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_diffe
| ren...).
| samatman wrote:
| The French are largely of Celtic descent, with some Frankish
| admixture in some regions, in others, practically none.
| Except in Gascony and the Pyrenees where they're Basque in
| descent, Gascon being of the same etymology as Basque.
|
| People of Frankish descent are mainly found in the
| Rhinelands, which does include a bit of France, but is mostly
| located in modern Germany.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franks
| ithkuil wrote:
| Yes, genetically and linguistically the Germanic rulers
| haven't tipped the scale to their side in France.
|
| But OTOH the name "France" is unequivocally Frankish
| (Germanic) and thus not something that Obelix, a Gaul from
| ~2070 years, ago would identify with.
| mgaunard wrote:
| That's Obelix.
|
| An obelisk is a type of pillar from Ancient Egypt.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I know. I was joking of course :)
|
| But Asterix and Obelix are of course named after asterisks
| and obelisks. It's part of the joke.
| yumraj wrote:
| It makes me sad that you had to explain it. :(
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| An example of how some people on this site are about as rigid
| as obelisks (lowercase) when it comes to understanding even
| very obvious jokes...
| amarant wrote:
| Or *friend, to put it briefly.
| crashmat wrote:
| No, that's obelix. Obelisk is is a type of storage composed of
| a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a
| square plastic enclosure.
| AlphaWeaver wrote:
| No, that's a floppy disk. An obelisk is a mythological snake
| that will turn you to stone if you look at it.
| Andrex wrote:
| It's an ancient Egyptian deity whose essence was trapped inside
| a trading card, but not before driving the card's initial
| artist to suicide[0].
|
| https://youtu.be/-nab64DWEh8?t=268
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| Growing up in another language than English an Obelisk was the
| NOD's main defensive structure.
| lstodd wrote:
| No, it's Gallente freighter from Eve Online.
| ikari_pl wrote:
| comparably desirable to a Tesla coil
| frozenport wrote:
| Where are the TEM images of the proposed structures?
| NobleLie wrote:
| Considering it's predicted shape is that of obelisk ("rod") one
| is left to imagine that this finding has only metagenomics
| behind it.
| benjamin-lee wrote:
| Not the author of this paper but am current PhD student focused
| on viroid discovery. There's no TEM but there are good methods
| such as RNAfold [0] for predicting their structures. In the
| case of rod-shaped RNAs, the prediction methods are quite good
| since it basically comes down to looking for substrings of
| reverse complement sequences within the circular RNA.
|
| [0]: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1748-7188-6-26
| frozenport wrote:
| The actual item is required to understand where it occurs and
| if these sequences have other explanations.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| If this turns out to be true, it's one of the most exciting basic
| biology findings in years. To discover a new type of organism,
| which seems to infect humans, or at least infects things that
| infect humans -- it's just amazing. How many mysterious diseases
| are caused by these things?
| chasil wrote:
| If you like that, then you will love gypsy transposons.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTR_retrotransposon
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