judiops:

derinthemadscientist:

derinthemadscientist:

Who wants to hear about some linguistic fuckery I discovered while trying to be clever

Okay so I was reading a linguistics post that mentioned -thal being
German for ‘valley’ and thus ending up on a lot of their place names,
and I’m thinking ‘the first Neandertal was found in Neandert(h)al,
right? I bet that means ‘frost valley’ or ‘forest valley’ or some shit. I
spy a chance to make fun of our dead cousins!’

So I looked it up and, boringly, it turns out Neandertal was named after its discoverer, Joachim Neander. Ah well.

Except ‘Neander’ was a German translation of his actual surname, ‘Neumann’. Neander means New Man.

By complete coincidence the Neanderthals were found in New Man Valley and then NAMED NEW MAN (VALLEY) and they’re Homo neanderthalensis, THE PEOPLE OF NEW MAN VALLEY and I just

My one thing here is that Neumann is a Germanic name. Neander was the Greek translation of the German name. Which makes sense, given that a lot of fancy scientific names pull from Greek and Latin.