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MrKipling (134790)

MrKipling
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by bargainsale on Saturday May 24, @05:03PM (#23526556)
Attached to: Successful Cold Fusion Experiment?
Latin "h", originally pronounced like English "h", eventually ceased to be pronounced at all; in the modern languages descended from Latin it is has been lost and is found, if at all, only in words borrowed from other languages.

So Latin "homo" "person" but Italian "uomo", Rumanian "om" and so on.
(The "h" in French "homme" has never been pronounced and is only there in the spelling by analogy with the Latin word).

In the time of the later Roman Republic and early Empire (when most of the famous Latin literature comes from) whether "h" was pronounced was a class thing; dropping "h"s was supposed to be a mark of ignorance or low status.
People insecure about their status would put in "h"s where they didn't belong (the poet Catullus has a whole poem mocking somebody who does this).

Even those who prided themselves on their education were already getting it wrong by then, though, and some of their mistakes got perpetuated:

"humerus" "upper arm" should be "umerus"
"anser" "goose" should be "hanser"

We can deduce a remarkable amount about how Classical Latin was pronounced; there's a good book about it:
"Vox Latina" by W Sidney Allen
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by iamlucky13 on Saturday May 24, @03:03AM (#23523716)
Attached to: First Exotic Space Thruster Test Ends in Explosion
The best projects usually have a development report buried somewhere in their history that contains the phrase, "...and then it exploded."

Percy Spencer (microwave oven): "...and then the egg exploded."
James Watt (steam engine): "...and then the boiler exploded."
Alfred Nobel (dynamite): "...and then the nitroglycerin-soaked soil exploded."
Vladmir Titov (Russian cosmonaut): "...and then the Soyuz rocket exploded."
Werner von Braun (NASA engineer): "...and then the Jupiter rocket exploded."
Yang Liwei (Chinese Taikonaut): "...and then the Long March rocket exploded."
Sony test engineer: "...and then the battery exploded."
J. Robert Openheimer: "...and then the Trinity device exploded"...oh wait, that was supposed to happen.

A more personal anecdote:
Someone in the shop at work needed a simple room-temperature dryer for a special project, so he got some large diameter PVC pipe that was handy, filled it with a desiccant, put the material in that needed drying, and screwed the cap on. Then he left it alone for a few hours.

Apparently some sort of gas-producing chemical reaction took place, probably helped by the sun shining through the open door, (...wait for it...) and then the drying chamber exploded, blasting the plastic lid through the ceiling 25 feet overhead and covering the work bay with the tiny pellets of desiccant.

Engineering is fun.
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  Swiss accidentally invade Liechtenstein 2007-03-03 16:18 deblau

Submitted by deblau on Saturday March 03 2007, @04:18PM
deblau writes "Ever wonder how the Swiss Army trains? Apparently by invading their neighbors. I guess they forgot to bring one of these."
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submission mainpage humor