The two parts to the word "helicopter"
are not "helil" and "copter", but "helico"
meaning spiral, and "pter" meaning one
with wings, like pterodactyl.
1044 AM-5Mar 2018
21,200 Retweets 67,241 Lkes
wait WHAT
Aderinthemadscientist: Wait, so... does -copter come "from" helicopter?
108echoes:
Yep! This is called rebracketing. Another famous
example would be"-burger": the original food item is
named after the German city, (Hamburgl+(er], but
semantically reinterpreted as (ham]+[burger].
I was JUST thinking about this and had a nearly identical exchange with a friend of mine over a sci-fi series we've been reading.
Humanity finally reverse engineered "kinetic fields" which allow the creation of force shields, synthetic gravity, stasis chambers, and the arbitrary conversation of energy into thrust WITHOUT a reaction mass, and we relatively promptly built VTOL vehicles that made traditional helicopters obsolete...
... But in the canon of the setting, nobody was coming up with a better name for the new vehicles than "helicopter", it was simply that no other names stuck.
But I realized that since Kinetic Force Emitters work via electrostatic means, we would probably have to call them Electrostatopters and god DAMN that feels awful to say. So like ... No wonder they kept calling them copters.
It's a sprawling collaborative webseries that all but codified the "HFY" (Humanity, Fuck Yeah) / "Humans are Space Orcs" subgenre -
-wherein our species discovers that, in the viewpoint of the rest of galactic society, WE are the terrifying scary space monsters.
I love it to bits. You should at least read "The Kevin Jenkins Experience" which was its sort of "episode zero"/prototypical story. There are dozens of semi-canonical spin-off stories many others have based within this same "Jenkinsverse" setting.
We wouldn't have to call them electrostaropters. In fact, my money is on such a thing in the real world being named completely differently. Maybe "drones" despite having pilots.
You have to differentiate there, Bürger (citizen) is different from Burg (castle) in German, and Hamburg is written without the ü, as it comes from castle, not citizen.
Does that mean the 'P' was supposed to be silent? You don't say puh-terodactyl without getting laughed at in school... Um, probably!! So, is it a actually called a helicoter?
The 'p' is only silent in English because English doesn't allow syllables to start with 'pt'. It was perfectly fine to do so in ancient Greek, where both the 'p' and the 't' would be pronounced, but when English borrowed the 'pt'-initial words, the 'p' gets deleted to make the word pronounceable.
But, it's perfectly fine in English for one syllable to end with 'p' and the next to start with 't', so English speakers have no problem saying 'cop-ter'.
Same with, for example, 'tsunami' vs. 'Mit-subishi' (which in Japanese is actually syllabified 'mi-tsu-bi-shi').
Technically they're not just fictional. People build little RC ones, they would just be incredibly complicated compared to even a helicopter to scale up and make controllable/powerful enough to carry people.
One of the cooler flying mechanisms that seem to be a dead end.
No, Bürger means Citizen, Burger doesn't really exist as a german word, but would mean "someone from a castle" or "someone doing something with castles".
Those Umlaut-Dots change the pronounciation and the meaning, they are important!