A few years back, when we almost went on a trip to Greece, I was reading up on Greek vocabulary and made an interesting linguistic observation: many European languages, even the ones that are less related, seem to have a word closely resembling "toilet". I remembered toilette from taking French, Bruce remembered toiletten from a trip to Germany, and I'd read about (pardon the Anglicization here) toualetta in Greek. Interesting, huh?
Over the past few days, we've been looking into going to Prague sometime in the fall, so I found a Czech tutorial website last night. Guess what word I found... toaletni! Proving my theory right. Shortly thereafter, I stumbled upon an online dictionary for multiple European languages and played around a little bit. Lo and behold, there are "toilet" like words in over 10 Eurpoean languages, ranging from Portuguese to Swedish to Bulgarian... wow! Even more amazing is the fact that Hungarian falls into this category (toalett) -- if you know anything about European language evolution, you'll know that Finnish and Hungarian are by far the least related to the rest of the continent.
So here's some food for thought. I'm thinking these "toilet" variations are more modern words, brought about by travel/free borders/etc. It just wouldn't make sense that all of these countries would de novo come up with variations on "toilet".
Talk about a sewer mind, eh???
In any case, it makes a helluva linguistics PhD thesis.
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