“Gilbert employed the Latin electricus to describe the observation that when you rub amber against some substances like wool or a cat’s fur, it sticks to the amber. We now that this clinging—and the zaps that appear between the amber and the substance rubbed against it—is due to static, but at the time, Gilbert supposed amber to be magnetic.”
@bibliolater@linguistics
It was through Gilbert's work that I learned of Petrus Peregrinus, whom Gilbert praised for actually experimenting. Petrus never managed to perfect his magnet-driven perpetual motion machine, however. https://archive.org/details/b24876859
“Gilbert employed the Latin electricus to describe the observation that when you rub amber against some substances like wool or a cat’s fur, it sticks to the amber. We now that this clinging—and the zaps that appear between the amber and the substance rubbed against it—is due to static, but at the time, Gilbert supposed amber to be magnetic.”
“Four factors are found to be significant predictors of the position of primary stress: endings, word complexity, the segmental structure of the final syllable, and syllable count. Moreover, this study confirms previous observations on the tendency for American English to have more final stress in French loanwords than British English.”
Dabouis, Q. and Fournier, P. (2024) ‘Stress in French loanwords in British and American English’, Journal of Linguistics, pp. 1–26. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226724000136.