• Blackout
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    2617 days ago

    China is a pretty big country to just skip like this lol. They call it Qiyou

            • lime!
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              1717 days ago

              i see! thanks. so it’s basically the same word as gas-oline then?

              • Blackout
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                -517 days ago

                Did you think it was going to be “Phoenix urine” or something cool like that?

                • lime!
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                  1617 days ago

                  no, it was mostly because the map is weird; the green part is not all “benzene”, it’s many different words rooted in the german “benzin”. so my assumption was that “other” languages probably have words based on the big, common words too, just not in a way the map creator understood. and you at least confirmed that for one country!

                  • @ThisIsNotHim@sopuli.xyz
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                    417 days ago

                    It does look like a pretty neat calque. I hadn’t noticed that the -oline ending was likely related to oleum.

                • @CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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                  316 days ago

                  I mean, sometimes China does do that. Per the other commenter diesel gets “kindling oil”, which might not involve mythical creatures but still is a neat thing to call it.