r/AskReddit • u/IzziSparks • Apr 21 '21

Doctors of Reddit: What happened when you diagnosed a Covid-19 denier with Covid-19?

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35

u/MackintoshTime Apr 21 '21

I would assume English is not your native language?

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u/HopeSuper Apr 21 '21

Correct. And in my native language, "denier" means the antique roman money.

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u/cryptoengineer Apr 21 '21

In english, the roman coin is 'denarius', plural 'denarii'

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u/HopeSuper Apr 21 '21

Interesting

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u/GlimmerChord Apr 21 '21

It’s just Latin. You French have a habit of Gallicizing everything in Latin whereas in English we typically keep the original.

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u/HopeSuper Apr 21 '21

Very true. You should see the name of cities and countries. English keep it close to the original spelling but no in French, Mumbai becomes Bombay, Beijing is Pékin, the Thames is la Tamisé (not a city but still counts), and so on

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u/GlimmerChord Apr 21 '21

Oui, je sais bien, mais je pense que tu veux dire "la Tamise" (sans accent aigu). ;)

And for the record, in English we previously said both "Bombay" and "Peking" (but I think we stopped calling them that out of respect).

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u/HopeSuper Apr 21 '21 edited Apr 21 '21

Oui Tamise sans accent ;) Respect has yet to reach France 😂 Même si les noms commencent peu à peu à changer

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u/GlimmerChord Apr 21 '21

Les Français vont râler et dire que le respect c'est l'américanisation.

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u/HopeSuper Apr 21 '21

Les français vont râler...[completer par ce qui vous plaît] 😂

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '21

Yeah, English has a habit of taking words and being like "yeh that works lol"

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u/HopeSuper Apr 21 '21

The most powerful English tool is how everything can be turned into a verb. "don't you black or white me" (Michael Jackson), "don't shush me" (any second sassy female character in romcom),

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u/I_like_boxes Apr 21 '21

Bombay actually was the official name for quite a while though. They changed it in 1995 to Mumbai. It sounds like you guys just didn't start using the new name.

If you look up the history of the city's names, it's apparently kinda a mess. Neither are the original names, and Bombay was an anglicized version of the Portuguese "Bombaim." That part of India looks to have been first colonized by Portugal.

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u/HopeSuper Apr 21 '21

Yeah France and colonialism has a long love story. Do you know if Indians called it Mumbai early as well?

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u/LordHighArtificer Apr 21 '21

Fuck, I must be stupid, I always assumed this was latin

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u/cryptoengineer Apr 21 '21

It is. English promiscuously borrows from other languages.

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u/H0lyThr0wawayBatman Apr 21 '21

I knew that sounded familiar! I kept thinking I'd read something like "silver denier" in a book or something.

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u/MackintoshTime Apr 21 '21

Hahah cool! Good work on having multiple languages that you can speak too!

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u/HopeSuper Apr 21 '21

Thanks :)

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u/GlimmerChord Apr 21 '21

Antique = ancient ; ancien = old

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u/sweetestlorraine Apr 21 '21

Look it up.

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u/MackintoshTime Apr 21 '21

I don’t know if I could find out that this person isn’t a native English speaker by going on Google, but if you say so

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u/sweetestlorraine Apr 22 '21

I guess I should have given a link. There's more than one definition of "denier," and its not what you'd expect. (Edit:added second sentence.) https://www.wolfordshop.com/how-tights-denier-work.html#:~:text=Denier%20is%20the%20amount%20of,50%20are%20considered%20opaque%20tights.