Announcing Jython, the sucessor to JPython (fwd)

[Alex Martelli]

"Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters" <mertz at gnosis.cx> wrote in message
news:mailman.972063532.569.python-list at python.org...
> "Alex Martelli" <aleaxit at yahoo.com>
> |And "Nike" was a term for "victory" (in Greek) from since
> |well before anybody raised coffee in the island of Java.
> |So why would it be 'more protectable' as a trademark...?
>
> 'Nike' we can probably date from around 8th Century B.C., I imagine (I
> am not a Greek philologist, however).  When did coffee cultivation
> begin? When did it begin on Java?

The Dutch introduced coffee to Java in the 18th Century.  As for
when it was first used in the Arab world, that's harder to establish.

It was a rare substance used in Arab medicine in the mid-9th
century, and some claim Christian monks in Ethiopia used it
earlier to keep awake, but maybe those were wild-grown coffee
plants, rather than cultivated -- it's hard to say for sure.  Some
say 11th/12th century.

Nike, the Goddess of Victory, is claimed by some scholars to
pre-date what we consider the "classical" Olympian gods in
Greek mythology.  If so, then it's likely that the 'age' of the
word is far greater than you suspect.  However, word history
is not my field, either... I only did linguistics (year ago) in
a computational-linguistics setting, studying frequencies and
patterns of _current_ usage, rather than their history.


Alex