This is maybe old news to every student of Spanish other than me, but the name for a roller coaster in Spanish is una montaña rusa - a Russian Mountain!!!
Apparently the Russians were the first to invent rides similar to roller coasters. In the seventeenth century they built ice slopes for sleds to ride down. That, in turn, led to people in warmer climates developing cars with wheels that ran on tracks down steep slopes. When the idea spread from Russia to France, the French called the rides "Les Montagnes Russes" and I guess the name stuck when they eventually made it to Spain.
According to Wikipedia, the following languages all use their equivalent of "Russian Mountain" to refer to roller coasters - Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French and Danish.
0 comments:
Post a Comment