Lake Ontario had its name longer than the US or Canada even existed
Pedantry (?) corner:
Six Nations Mohawk history YouTuber Malcolm PL says that the name just means “good lake”. The “lake of shining waters” translation is sort of an embellished/exoticized translation of a type you’ll often see with Indigenous place names: the real meanings of the names are often kind of boring and utilitarian, maybe even offputting, but through some sort of telephone game the translation that sticks around in pop culture is some really poetic-sounding oh-so-close-to-nature thing that looks good on a postcard, something you can image someone with a Hollywood Indian accent saying while accompanied by serene flute music, and then a hawk screeches and thunder roars as the white man is enlightened by the Native’s sage wisdom. Compare and contrast the supposed meanings of “Idaho”, “Minnesota”, and the North Korean word for “hamburger”.
Also, Haudenosaunee is a confederation of several nations with their own different but related languages. The form of the name “Ontario” in English likely comes from the Wyandot name, ontari꞉io; the form in the post title, Oniatarí-io, is the Mohawk form.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sGjJJOBsPQ
Cēterum cēnseō iūs auctōris esse dēlendum.What is Sonic speaking? Looks like Latin but that didn’t have ē/ō did it?
It is Latin, more specifically the line is a reference to a very memed-on quote of Cato the Elder. Those horizontal lines over the vowels, known as macrons, weren’t used when writing Latin in Roman times, but are very commonly used when writing Latin in the present day to indicate long vowels, especially in dictionaries and learners’ materials. It’s a similar case with macrons in Old English.
Cēterum cēnseō iūs auctōris esse dēlendum.
“good lake” really is the perfect name for it cause it’s such a damn good lake
Six Nations Mohawk history YouTuber Malcolm PL says that the name just means “good lake”. The “lake of shining waters” translation is sort of an embellished/exoticized translation of a type you’ll often see with Indigenous place names: the real meanings of the names are often kind of boring and utilitarian, maybe even offputting, but through some sort of telephone game the translation that sticks around in pop culture is some really poetic-sounding oh-so-close-to-nature thing that looks good on a postcard, something you can image someone with a Hollywood Indian accent saying while accompanied by serene flute music, and then a hawk screeches and thunder roars as the white man is enlightened by the Native’s sage wisdom. Compare and contrast the supposed meanings of “Idaho”, “Minnesota”, and the North Korean word for “hamburger”.
I often feel that Chinese is very flowery with its language, then you read some shit like “Melon City” randomly interspersed into it
Or just 芜湖 which I can’t help but read enthusiastically as ‘woohoo!’
Insert that joke about a Chinese person getting a tattoo of the word “SCUBA” and saying it’s an ancient English proverb that means “though my head is completely underwater, I still breathe nevertheless”
Cēterum cēnseō iūs auctōris esse dēlendum.SCUBA tattoo or graphic tee sounds so cool ngl
damn thats a good lake
the North Korean word for “hamburger”.
???
You mean the Korean word for hamburger? Or am I missing the joke
The Korean language as used in the Seppo-occupied half of Korea broadly favors English loanwords for new concepts, and the Korean language as used in the Seppo-sanctioned half of Korea broadly favors linguistic purism. This is to say that the division of Korea has also caused the language to diverge somewhat in the two halves. I figured that calling these lects “South Korean” and “North Korean” would be the right blend of precise, short, and readily-understood.
One example of this language division in Korea is hamburgers, which are known as 햄버거 haembeogeo south of the DMZ and 고기겹빵 gogi gyeop’ppang north of the DMZ (and south of the Chinese border). What gogi gyeop’ppang literally means is “meat sandwich”, however the North Korean word for sandwich, 겹빵이 gyeop’ppang’i, itself literally means “double bread”. The South Korean word for sandwich is unsurprisingly 샌드위치 saendeuwichi. So, taking these literal meanings of gogi gyeop’ppang and gyeop’ppang’i, coupled with Kim Jong-il once proposing to popularize hamburgers to help feed his people, this whole story got telephone-gamed by sensationalist Western media into “did you know that Kim Jong-il once claimed to have invented hamburgers, and he called them ‘double bread with meat’? what a freak!!” — it’s just a fake story with a deliberately stilted translation intended to make the DPRK look weird and exotic and off-putting. So my point is that translations manifest the biases of the translator and can be used as propaganda, to reinforce stereotypes about a group of people: whether the stereotypes are “freaky weirdos” or “noble savages”, the voice that a translation gives to a foreign culture can be used to distance that culture from the translator’s own. Icelandic linguistic purism is treated as quaint and worthy of celebration, DPRK linguistic purism is treated as evil and shame-worthy.
Cēterum cēnseō iūs auctōris esse dēlendum.I really enjoy reading your linguistic posts. You do such a great job making it interesting and understandable
Thank you for giving the context, that’s super interesting
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
So if the province is named after the lake, and the lake is renamed America, is America now a province of Canada?
Person in Canada here! I now declare that America shall be renamed Upper Mexico.
Its’s all Mexico?
i think the province is now also called “america”
Right, and it’s a province of Canada!
So Trump manages to be racist even when he isn’t trying to be. It’s like he’s got an instinctive, preternatural racism.
He’s like the final boss of idiotic pieces of shit, so resolutely on the wrong side of history for literally everything that he commits acts of racism that would mortify a normal human without even noticing he’s done it.
He might be the first soul to escape the cosmic wheel of karma by just dropping right off the bottom of it.
So its name is Lake-Lake?
Plenty of that across languages since people would go to an area and ask the locals “what do you call this lake/river/mountain range/desert/ocean?” And since that was the only lake/river/mountain range/desert/ocean the locals really knew about, it was just called that in their language.
The indigenous people probably just called it Oniatarí-io. The settlers called it Lake lake of the shining waters.
silly crackers have done it again, like calling chai tea-tea
sahara means deserts (plural), so “the sahara desert” means the deserts desert
may I have it with some naan bread?
This is how a lot of historic locations got their names, funny enough. If you’re a hunter-gatherer tribe and you only have one river or whatever in travel distance, you’re probably just going to call it “the river” because it’s going to be obvious which one you’re talking about.
Perhaps the most famous examples being Torpenhow Hill, which can be translated as Hillhillhill Hill, or the River Avon which is the River River.
there’s a long list of river rivers
The US borders are the Lake Ontario (lake) at the north, the Rio Grande (river) river at the south…
I think it might just be a US thing, in Europe it’s still Lake Ontario (Lake America).
This is so lame.
