I’ve spent an amazing day with Klara, and now I’m in the mood for silly jokes. This one is from Facebook.
6 responses to “Silly Joke”
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“Silly joke”
Good one, though! I’ve seen that word thousands of times, and my brain never broke it apart like that. 🙂
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Me neither! And I’m a philologist.
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I broke the word apart that way years ago.
It is curious how different people see different things with the same information! I knew many people in Poland who had never realized that ‘dlaczego’ (which means ‘why’) was a compound of ‘dla’ and ‘czego’, meaning, respectively ‘what’ and ‘for’.
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OOPS! correction: ‘dla’ means ‘for’ and czego means ‘what’. Sorry.
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It’s exactly the same in Russian but it’s 2 words.
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“It’s exactly the same in Russian but it’s 2 words.”
Whether written as one word or two “why” is “for what” also in:
Spanish,
Italian,
French,
Czech,
Hungarian,
Modern GreekThat might also be the etymology of German warum (Scandinavian languages use where-for)
Even in informal English there’s ‘what – for’
What did you do that for?
What’s weird is English having a single morpheme with that meaning. That’s pretty unusual in European languages.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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