Etymology

Although my blog has been inactive and somewhat dead for some time now, things are working again. The appmagic server was hacked into and some of the settings for the server passwords needed to be updated. All is well again.

I just got an email from someone at Mozilla. It seems someone there noticed my recommendation of Mozilla Firefox and asked me to add a button to their site. While I already have a link, I figured that I'd add one of their buttons as well. It's rather small because I picked the unobtrusive one, but I felt it couldn't hurt. It's located at the bottom of the sidebar.

Work is going well, although it's winding down. I'm finished with my calculus class, which means that I can get on to the proper work of finishing integrals (I'm on integration by parts) and doing some more physics (I've skimmed through about half of the AP mechanics topics, and I'm approaching rotational dynamics, the first topic that is mostly new to me). In other words, now that my class is over, I'll have the time and energy to do meaningful things. Calculus is meaningful, but not when I'm wasting such a ridiculous amount of time in such a ridiculous class.

I found an interesting little tidbit of etymological trivia today that I found rather interesting. The word meaning money in Latin is pecūnia, which originates from the Latin word for cattle, pecus. According to Wheelock's Latin, the English word fee is related to the German word Vieh via the Old English feoh and the Old High German fehu, all meaning cattle. Although the Oxford English dictionary disagrees by claiming that fee orginates from the medieval Latin feudum (I don't know the meaning), the Indo-European connection of money to cattle is remarkable. It seems to suggest that the ancestors of Europeans and Middle Easterners, the speakers of Proto-Indo-European, had a great value for cattle. Well, in fact, this prompted me to look into the matter a little. The speakers of Proto-Indo-European were a society known as the Kurgan that had some agriculture, but engaged in both herding and domestication of livestock approximately 6000 years ago near the Black Sea. From what I can tell, they engaged in a great deal of animal husbandry. Excavations of Kurgan rubbish heaps yield a large quantity of cattle bones.

Linguists have reconstructed much of the Proto-Indo-European language. It reveals much about they way this particular culture lived. It's pretty interesting what can be deduced about people from their diction.