Pythagoras’ famous theory - which has long been proven and should be made into mathematical law - will never be, because the therm ‘Pythagorean Theorem’ sounds so pleasing.

    • Carrolade@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      4 months ago

      English was not engineered from the ground up to be sensible and consistent. Instead it evolved slowly over time, as new things got tacked on year after year, and other things died out or drifted in pronunciation.

      Here’s what Middle English sounded like:

      “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licóur Of which vertú engendred is the flour.”

      -Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

      • jetA
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        4 months ago

        I wonder how that is pronounced vs today. I imagine the spoken version drifts, but the sounds are more similar than the writing.

        • Carrolade@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          4 months ago

          We can’t know for certain, since no audio recordings exist for obvious reasons, and we’d need a time machine to find a fluent, native speaker we can be confident is using period-correct pronunciations.

          We can make educated guesses though, by deconstructing existing descendent languages and tracing back commonalities.

          Here’s what we’ve got so far:

          https://youtu.be/5NB2Z6pZBNA

          Also worthy of note that this sort of writing would’ve been distinct from daily commoner chit-chat, which would probably be more recognizable to us. Not sure how much of that got recorded and survived through the years though.

    • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      4 months ago

      I think this is straight forward. In our everyday life laws aren’t derived from something else either. They just are. And OP seemed to have a hierarchical view of them as well. They were just under the assumption that a theorem could be “promoted”.

      I guess a real-life analogy would be a judge making a ruling under some laws. That would make a precedent in many countries but not a law. If then a new law were passed it could invalidate that precedent similar to someone disproving a theorem.