Comment

Comment on Why do some languages use gendered nouns?

Lath@kbin.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Thank you kindly. Sadly I cannot. Yesterday I was on a trip and happened to pass through one such location, which is why I can talk about it now.

The folk tale was that some Polish cartographers were mapping the area and asked some locals where they were. The locals shrugged and answered in their language a variant of "Fuck knows". The cartographers took it to heart and the official name of that location on their map became a slightly altered variation of that joking reply.
Naturally later on, a copy of that map was used by the government in charge for census and the name remained sealed in stone.

source

Sort:hotnew top

pendulum_@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Sir Terry Pratchett (GNU) wrote a piece of fiction along these lines. In The Light Fantastic:

The reason for this is regrettably all too common. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don’t Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.

source