Originally Posted by
monitor
This, of course, was reinforced by the fact that the word for telephone in her native language was "fernsprecher," which literally translates to something like "speaker to far away places."
Telephone literally translates to pretty much the same thing. It's from the Greek
tele (far) and
phone (sound). Televisions are 'far sees', and we have many other 'far' words in English: telegraph, telegram, telepathy, telemetry, etc.