watching ENOLA HOLMES with @cearo_thyme got me thinking I have no fuckin clue what the difference between a Marquis and a Marquess is, or in what if any contexts other than RHCP songs the word is pronounced "mahr-KEE"
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Replying to @Nymphomachy @cearo_thyme
Trust the British to make a complicated peerage chart with two nigh identical ranks. It's like if we had President and Presidente
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They don't, it's a marquess in Britain and a marquis in France
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Replying to @arthur_affect @loudpenitent and
ok but no, this is *bizarre* - according to Wikipedia, almost *every single* European language [except German, but including French] has words cognate to both margrave and marquis, which it doesn't seem like correspond to two distinct ranks.
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Replying to @Random832 @arthur_affect and
and if there's a general trend of avoiding translating noble ranks to non-cognate words, why *didn't* this happen with count/earl/graf [though count/earl is maybe an example of it *partially* happening]?
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Ha, the funny thing is that while the official story of the English refusing to change "earl" to "count" after the Norman Conquest was national pride, this doesn't explain why they did import a bunch of other titles, including a female earl being a "countess"
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