orteil42:

the dutch language loves its latin calques. for instance where english or french are happy to use light variants of “subiectus” for the word subject, dutch breaks the latin word down to its raw components (ie. “something that is thrown under”) and translates those, resulting in “onderwerp”, literally “under-throw”. also this guy who looked at the words for mathematics and chemistry every other language used and decided hmm. mmmm no we’re not doing that