OT: Bioscope (was: Marx Brothers)

Christophe Grandsire scripsit:

> Except that Indonesian probably borrowed it from Dutch, which has
> "bioscoop" as a current word (always wondered about its etymology. Seems
> like such a strange word...).
Well, the etymology is straight Greek bio-skopos, with phonetic Dutch
spelling.  But the first modern language to make use of it was French!
In 1892 the inventor Georges Demenÿ patented a motion picture projector
which projected images from rotating glass discs.  When it was marketed
by Léon Gaumont from the end of 1895, it was renamed a Bioscope.

The word was widely used in various national languages for various motion
picture projectors of the period.  The British version, invented by the
American Charles Urban, which used conventional movie film and was an
improvement of Edison's Vitascope, got worldwide distribution and spread
the word around the world briefly, where it seems to have stuck in Dutch
and Afrikaans (and possibly in S.A. English, I'm not sure).

There is still an Impérial Bioscope movie theater in Brittany:
http://www.imperialbioscope.com .

ObLang: what is that diaeresis doing on Demenÿ's name?  It's obviously
not functioning as a diaeresis, as there is no adjacent vowel.
--
John Cowan
        jcowan@reutershealth.com
                I am a member of a civilization. --David Brin

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