• TimewornTraveler@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 days ago

      揮發油 if same as Korea. qiyou sounds like air oil though. 유 油 is oil, qi I don’t have handy to write it but it’s a very simple character.

          • lime!@feddit.nu
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            4 days ago

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

            • Blackout@fedia.io
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              4 days ago

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

              • lime!@feddit.nu
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                4 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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                  4 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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                3 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.