Closestools, crappers, and horse buckets
Big news from China yesterday:
"2,200-year-old flush toilet — oldest ever found — unearthed at palace ruins in China"
Aspen Pflughoeft, Miami Herald / Yahoo
Thu, February 16, 2023 at 5:37 PM EST
What a gift to humanity!
All the terms in the title of this post mean one or another kind of toilet, but function differently and date from different times and places. We've talked about many types of toilets on Language Log before (for a few see "Selected readings" below). Here I want to focus on two Chinese models, one dating to two millennia ago that was recently discovered archeologically, so we don't have a proper name for it yet, and an archaic-sounding one, mǎtǒng 馬桶 ("horse bucket"), that is the current, conventional, common term for the toilet across China.
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