lvxferre

I hope that it haunts OpenAI.

I cannot think of any language besides English in which an “f” can be written as “ph”.

Latin. In fact it's where this mess started out.

Ancient Greek had a three-way distinction between the following sets of consonants:

• ⟨Φ Θ Χ⟩ /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ - they sound like English pill, till, kill; there's a clear asphhhhiration in them
• ⟨Π Τ Κ⟩ /p t k/ - they sound like English spill, still, skill; no aspiration
• ⟨Β Δ Γ⟩ /b d g/ - more like English bill, dill, give; instead of aspiration you vibrate the vocal folds before the consonant even starts

Latin borrowed a lot of Greek words. The words with the second and third set of consonants were no problem; they were mostly spelled in Latin with ⟨P T C⟩ and ⟨B D G⟩. But Latin didn't have the sounds of the first set, and for Latin speaking ears they sounded like they had /h/. So they were spelled with ⟨PH TH CH⟩, to represent that /h/ sound.

So back then the digraphs still made sense... except that Greek changed over time. And what used to be pronounced /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ ended as /f θ x/ (like English fill, think, and Scottish loch). And Latin speakers started pronouncing those words with the "new" Greek sounds instead of the old ones. But they were still spelling them the same.

From that that ⟨PH⟩ spread out across a lot of orthographies using the Latin alphabet.

Italian and Spanish subbed ⟨PH⟩ with ⟨F⟩ ages ago; examples here and here. Portuguese stopped using it in 1911 (ACL / "European" standard) asd 1943 (ABL / "Brazilian") standard.

In Portuguese it was part of a wider wave of orthographic reforms, that also got rid of etymological double consonants and ⟨Y⟩. A lot of people were hilariously annoyed, example stolen from Wikipedia:

Imaginem esta palavra phase, escripta assim: fase. Não nos parece uma palavra, parece-nos um esqueleto (...) Affligimo-nos extraordinariamente, quando pensamos que haveriamos de ser obrigados a escrever assim!

Imagine this word phase, written like this: fase. It doesn't resemble us a word, it resemble us a skeleton. (...) We get profoundly afflicted, when we think that we would be required to write it like this!

It depends on the amount of errors and if you used the -verbose option.

The opposite, it ultimately comes from a Chinese language via Portuguese.

I'm binge watching all three seasons of Log Horizon. And already in the third one. Fuck, I forgot how fun that anime series was.

At least Mint has an OEM install; on the first boot after installing the system, it asks you to create a user (plus language, layout etc.). I never used it though, but I expect other distros to have a similar feature.

My bad, and thanks for the info! I'll correct my comment, I kind of rushed checking the etymologies.

China comes from sina/sino. I don’t remember where this comes from. Sanskrit?

Odds are that both were independently borrowed from Sanskrit चीन / Cīna:

• China: Sanskrit, then Persian, Portuguese, English. By then Portuguese likely still had the [tʃ] "tch" sound.
• Sina: Sanskrit, then Persian, Arabic, Greek, Latin, English. Arabic converted Sanskrit [tɕ] into [sˤ], then Greek into [s].

Note: dunno in English but at least in Latin "Sina" (often Sinae, the plural) refers specifically to southern China. The north is typically called Serica (roughly "of the silk").

A bit of both.

I don't typically build things just for the looks, but once I'm building them I take aesthetics into account. Just the usual - picking a style that fits what I'm building (e.g. cottagecore for villager-powered farms, industrial for Thermal mods, steampunk for Create etc.), design the thing in creative mode, then build something that fits the terrain OK to host my contraption.

back to Sanskrit, being the grand daddy of English

Sanskrit is more like English's uncle than granddaddy: English is from Proto-Germanic, and both Proto-Germanic and Sanskrit are from Proto-Indo-European.

English likely got the name from Portuguese, "Japão" *[ʒä'pɐ̃ŋ] (see note). I don't think that it's from Dutch "Japan" because otherwise the name would end as "Yapan", as Dutch uses a clear [j] ("y") sound.

In turn Portuguese got it from either Malay or some Chinese language. I think that it's from Cantonese 日本 jat⁶ bun² [jɐt˨ puːn˧˥]. Portuguese has this historical tendency to transform [j] into [ʒ] (the "g" in "genre"), and to mess with any sort of nasal ending.

The name in Chinese languages can be analysed as meaning simply "Sun origin". Because it's to the east of China.

In turn, there are a few ways to refer to Japan in Japanese:

• 日本 / Nihon - it's a cognate of that Cantonese jat⁶ bun². Except that it uses the Japanese rendering of Wu Chinese words.
• 日本 / Nippon - same as above, with a slightly more conservative pronunciation (Japanese converted a lot of [p] into [h]).
• 大和 / Yamato - it's metaphorically referring to the whole (Japan) by one of its part (the Yamato province, modern Nara).
• 日の本の国 / Hinomoto-no-Kuni - poetic and dated name. 日/hi = Sun, 本/moto = origin, 国/kuni = land, の = an adposition**. So it also means "land of the origin of the Sun". The big difference here is that all words used are inherited from Old Japanese, so there's no Chinese borrowing involved.

*note: that [ŋ] is reconstructed for around 1500 or so (Nanban trade times), given the word was also spelled Japam back then. A more typical contemporary pronunciation would be more like [ʒä'pɜ̃ʊ̯].

**the best way I know to explain Japanese の/no is that it works like a reversed English "of": in English you'd say "origin of Sun", in Japanese you'd say "Sun no origin" (hi no moto = 日の本). I only remember this because of Boku no Hero Academia, because "boku no" = "of I" (my).