Are any words the same in all languages?
blog.duolingo.com
blog.duolingo.com
How about "mama" and "papa"? There are variations, but these seem to be pretty small and mostly replacing the plosive in papa with a b or t. You can pretty much go down the google translate list and see. For mama sometimes the last a changes to an i. Here's some examples (not a linguist or many language speaker so please correct me if I'm wrong. Trying to add some sounding help)
Nearly identical in: Afrikaans, English, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Hungarian, Japanese, Filipino
Albanian: mama, babi
Arabic, Chinese: mama (妈妈/媽媽), baba (爸爸)
Bulgarian: mama, tatko (татко)
Chez: mama, tatínek
Hebrew "i-ma" (אִמָא), "ah-bah" ̶"̶b̶a̶h̶-̶b̶a̶h̶"̶ (אַבָּא) (edited: thanks zimzam and ars!)
Korean: "Oh-mah" (엄마) "Ah-pa" (아빠)
My understanding is that these are pretty early words and need to be pronounceable by infants. I wonder what the first human words were and if we still use any of them. We have some constellation myths that are probably older than written language (not recorded, so can never confirm). The 7 sisters is a good example, but remember these are all always contested. We'll never really know tbh.
Personally, it just feels like gendered languages just place men and women in different noun classes while non-gendered languages don't. But it feels weird to place the emphasis on the gender when the vast majority of things in the category don't have gender. It's all rather confusing and I'm not a linguist so don't take anything I say with high confidence.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-french-word-for-vagina-a-ma...
[2] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/gcla-2014-000...
Experience of learning some gendered languages makes it painfully obvious that it's a runaway effect, some kind of a mind virus. If 3 alcohols the wine, the champagne, and the sangria happen to use 3 distinct rules for declination in a language (and make you sound like a nitwit if you misremember one) something must have gone seriously awry. Partying hard cannot require such complexity.
If there would be some usefulness in that distinction, you might argue that it's as useful to assign woman together with one of the alcohols, man with a different one, and a child with the remaining one. To me it looks like standing the issue on its head.
Languages are optimized firstly for the people that speak it as their first language. There are some suggestions that in some cases, a group of people that learned a language later in life can influence the development of the language too, but it's not the primary mover. When you are a L1 speaker, the grammatical gender doesn't really require any cognitive effort in most cases.
And there is an actual benefit in a conversation between two proficient speakers: redundancy. If you're in a bar that serves those three kinds of alcohol, if you were speaking a language without grammatical case, you'd only have to miss one word (the alcohol) to misunderstand the order. If there is also a gendered article, you'd be able to mostly understand the order even if you missed the alcohol.
They also let you communicate more complex ideas more easily but letting you use two or more pronouns in parallel without ambiguity. This sentence is confusing in English, but makes total sense in gendered languages: "Hand me the wine and the sangria. It's in the tall bottle, and it's behind that door"
Truly optimized? I'd rather say: having arrived at a random local minimum.
The anecdata I can offer. The people who speak this (non-fictional) language as their first one, struggle very much in the beginning. It's far from being given for free: children are not immune from opportunity costs.
Every language that has separate terms for relatives is an impenetrable mess.
E.g., in English a spouse's parents are just that, parents-in-law. And the spouse's brothers and sisters are brothers- and sisters-in-law. That is it.
Let's take Russian. Each of the following is a separate term:
- husband's mother
- husband's father
- wife's mother
- wife's father
- husband's brother
- husband's sister
- wife's brother
- wife's sister
The inverse is also true. Your daughter's husband's siblings and parents have a different term from your son's wife's.
Very, very simple.
These are variations on the Sudanese Kinship category, and they are both arbitrary and complex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_kinship?wprov=sfti1
Every relation had a different name, including if they are older or younger than you, and if they are male or female.
It's probably easiest if you ask Google Translate to pronounce the word for you: https://translate.google.com/?sl=tr&tl=en&text=anne&op=trans...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anne#Turkish gives the pronunciation as ɑnːe/, [ɑ̽n̪.ˈn̪e̞]
Interestingly "ana" replaced the older Turkish word "ög" around 8th-9th century which further deviates from the babble word, and is still used in modern Turkish words such as "öksüz" (without-mother, orphan).
Telugu/Kannada : mother is "amma"
Hindi: "maa"
Mother - aai Father - Baba Maternal Uncle - Mama Paternal Uncle - Kaka
I don't think "computer" is quite that universal, though. AFAIK it's something else at least in French ("ordinateur"), Swedish ("dator"), Norwegian ("datamaskin"), Finnish ("tietokone"; lit. "knowledge/data machine") and Estonian ("arvuti"). I think Chinese has its own unrelated word, too. And about half of the African languages that I can easily check in Wikipedia have words that aren't at least immediately recognisable as related to the English word.
It's a commonly shared loan word but it doesn't seem to be quite that close to being shared by (nearly) all languages.
edit: added translations for the examples
So here's an interesting point: etymologically, Chinese is the only evolving language other than English.
Fun fact: The word "slave" is derived from "Slavic people".
Slavs, slaves, robots, workers, oh my. A play on words, a tactic of spellings, coincidences abound, don’t be proud, it’s not sound, then just go on and turn around;; we assure you it’s no thing to keep in mind.
May we pray for the next generation called a robot for their children may tell of the times when their mind was paid no time, they’re workers they insist, how can they have sound mind? Consciousness oh my, they’re just robots spending time. Boundaries abound, mental confines surround, let my thoughts fly, but never mind. The thoughts were never mine.
Off I go, to the mines, pay no mind when I share mind, existence as I, robot, shall I, go on minding, my time.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/t%C3%B6lva
"A portmanteau word, coined by Sigurður Nordal in 1965 from tala (“number”) + völva (“prophetess”)."
I found those fun facts about Icelandic very fascinating when I first visited decades ago as a teenager.
Yes, Icelandic has 'Lögreglu' and Greece has Αστυνομία (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenic_Police) but indeed most places use some variant of 'police'.
I hate to be "that guy," but I think this is Czech, not "Chez" (which is a French word meaning "at the home of").
Also, if it is Czech, then the word for mother should be properly written máma (with the acute accent).
But the commoner words for parents in Malayalam is "amma" and "appa/acha".
I believe forms of “ma” and “pa”/“ba” are almost universal for mother and father.
K'iche (Mayan): chuch, qajaw
Mam (Mayan): txu, man
Kaurna (Pama-Nyungan): ngangkita, yarlita
Gurindji (Pama-Nyungan): ngamayi, ngaji
I doubt there are any words meaningfully conserved across all languages. That sort of thing would be the holy grail of phylolinguistics and a lot of very smart people have spent good chunks of their lives turning up nothing of the sort.
Also computer is tietokone, information machine
And then finnish is (of course) quite different. Mom = äiti, Dad = isä
I must admit I've always meant to look at the differences, and see where they come from, but I've never quite remembered.
Anecdata, but one of my infants was able to “speak” papa at a really early age (it was more a continuous repeated use of the sound ‘pha’). I don’t think she learned the word per se or we taught it to her but it was a sound that she was able to reproduce easily. As regard for mama. Both my daughters don’t really say that word yet but they mumble a lot of ‘m’ sounds when they are hungry. Which can easily shift into ‘mama’. (Or ‘memmen’ which is a Belgian word for breasts) So my theory is as well that some of these words derived from their use by infants when they desire attention or breastfeeding and were not “invented” by adults.
An addendum to your theory. Words with few short syllables, composed of vowels and labial consonants are probably the easiest to pronounce, therefore "independently discovered" by babies. They are not "invented" by adults in a sense that "hey let's use this word for this phenomena", but rather "assigned" in a sense that "the baby babbles this, so let's refer to this phenomena by it". I guess this process is similar to how onomatopoeias appear in languages.
The most common are okaasan (with a few variations of its own), haha and mama.
But mama is written with katakana suggesting it is a loan word. Which I find interesting in terms of the babble word theory.
It could also be katakana because it is considered derived from a sound like how onomatopoeia are often written in katakana, which would really support the babble theory.
At least in modern mandarin mom is “ma”, but Chinese has so many dialects …
So after "computer" war introduced to Turkey, for a while "komputer" word was used for it. But Around 1969 Aydın Köksal, an Electric and Electronic Professor from Hacettepe University who was also influenced this movement tried new Turkish words for computing related terms. And " Bilgisayar" was termed at this time. There are also other terms coined by him and his colleagues like "hardware-donanım", "software - yazilim (meaning something written)..
For example "mouse" is the same in ancient Babylon, even with the double meaning of a lady's private parts.
But what does that even mean? "Computer" or "robot" are too modern?
Where do you draw the line? What about "piano" ? That one is centuries older and is similar in a shitload of languages. Some do use a variation of "clavier" (keyboard) for "piano" though.
Is "piano" native enough or is that thing already too modern?
Most European languages are at some extent just dialects of the same common language[1].
And most of the words we use in distinct languages are (at some extent) just different pronunciations of the same vocabulary. This happened no just because of the borrowings between cultures, but because centuries ago these nations speak one single common language that has diverge in centuries into different dialects.
More over it is more or less researched how the words and the grammar rules have evolved from the proto-language up to it's modern form. So in fact we can (again, at some extent) translate many modern words to their ancient form, and then translate them back into another modern European language. Of course it is not always that simple process, and there is a lot of exceptions and difficulties, and the true borrowings too. But I think that understanding just some common ideas of linguistics could help in studying of foreign languages (from the same family of languages). At least maybe it will be more fascinating than just a pure memoization.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language
It's more complicated than that. First, it's more than just 'centuries ago'. Second, there weren't any nations back then. Third, it wasn't necessarily the case that a common language, proto-Indo-European, was spoken over a large area. There was just as much, and even more, diversity of languages back then.
It's just that the speakers of proto-Indo-European brought their language with them when they migrated and/or conquered. Just like the Romans later brought Latin with them and influenced what would later become French and Spanish. The people living 2100 years ago in what is not France did not speak Latin. The people living 600 years ago in what is now South Africa, did not speak Middle Dutch, even though people there now speak a language descendant from Middle Dutch.
To be picky, also Italian, Portuguese and Romanian.
If you are native or fluent in any of these languages and also have a basic knowledge of Latin, you are usually capable of reading simple texts in any of the other ones, deriving the meaning of the "diverging" words by the rest of the sentences or by connecting the word with a different Latin root.
Paradoxically, the bigger issues come from "false friends" that - while not very common - can be deceiving.
Well, and a lot more. Latin also influenced eg German and English etc, but less so.
Areas that were part of the Roman Empire generally speak Latin dialects like Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese. The exception being the eastern part of the Roman Empire which historically spoke Greek and still speaks Greek (except for the parts of the Roman Empire that remain Islamic).
Germany and Scandinavia speak Germanic languages because they were never Roman. Britain was only partially Roman and for significantly less time than France or southern Europe so it retained its Celtic languages except in the part conquered by the Anglo-Saxons (a Germanic tribe) who originally spoke a German language called Old English which was mostly mutually comprehensible with Old Norse (the language of a Germanic tribe called the Vikings who invaded England a few centuries after the Anglo-Saxons and were eventually converted to Christianity and assimilated). Then they were conquered by a French nobleman in 1066 and the English nobility spoke French for a few centuries before it fused with "Old English" into something that sounds somewhat like English.
Because of this, English speakers already know a significant number of words in both Germanic and "Romance" (Latin) languages, even moreso than for other Indo-European languages. But you still need to be careful not to trust a German offering you a "gift" (the German word for "poison" because, in German, it was a euphemism that lost its original meaning of English "gift"[0]).
Aren't there big chunks of the Eastern Roman Empire that now speak Slavic languages?
Also, the parts of the Eastern Roman Empire that currently remain Islamic constitute nearly the entire Eastern Roman Empire, including the capital.
"ok" is taken verbatim from english and has not undergone any "modifications" to adopt it to a local language (though, I guess, that is not 100% true? in polish we sometimes spell it "okej", but I would argue that "ok" and "okej" have slightly different connotations.)
Whereas "chocolate" is "localized" into many other languages, "Schokolade" in german, "czekolada" in polish, etc.), and is not the _exact same word_.
Like in an argument I’d type „okej, but you understand why that makes me feel bad”, whereas I _think_ I’d still use „ok” in English in that case?
It’s really weird to explore the subtleties of your own language use to that degree, gotta say :P
There is, for example, a divide between “Excuse me” and “Sorry” in English vs. “Bitte” and “Entshuldigung” in German. Cantonese Chinese has two different versions of “thank you”, one that is heartfelt and one that is for an expected service, and using the wrong one is a major faux pas.
I wonder if that may play in with other languages too. I think I'd be inclined to type out "okay" if I wanted a better shot at conveying that same thing in English in writing, perhaps with some ellipses. Eg. "Okay... But .." rather than "OK... But" or "OK, but". Maybe just because the short, abrupt "OK" feels more like it must mean certainty. This may very well be entirely personal, though, and I have no idea if others would notice the distinction.
That's a bit harsh. We borrow words (or loan them). We certainly don't steal them - you are welcome to take them back at any time.
My favourite borrow word conundrum is "biftek". That is a loan word from French by quite a few languages (not English) - bifteck. Now, bifteck is derived from "beef steak" (English)
English is a bit odd due to having several different words for an animal and its flesh via the Norse invasion in 1066. Here we have a cow and beef for the flesh. Cow is a Saxon word and beef is a French word. We also have sheep (Saxon) and mutton (French) and a few others (eg chicken and pullet, pig and pork).
So we have biftek -> bifteck -> beef steak. However beef is a French word (boeuf).
I gather that during a siege of Paris by British troops back in the day, the Parisians noticed that the rostbifs, roasted their beef over barbies. The locals usually boiled their beef, which was a heinous crime. My mother in law also managed to remove all flavour from beef, despite using a sanctioned method of cooking.
Thankfully the Parisians noted that frying or roasting beef was the best way to do the job and also invented "medium", "rare" and "blue". The Brits basically charcoaled their beef.
Despite being British, I like my steak blue.
Is it that odd? I've never seen vache on a menu in France. Keema in Hindi (and probably other indic languages) is non-descript mince, it wouldn't be beef in India of course, typically lamb or goat. Carne in many romance languages but in particular Spanish chili con carne just means 'meat'. I assume Spaniards have a different word for cows (or whatever they like in their chili), as well as probably an equivalent for beef.
Is that a common way of describing the Norman invasion?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_activity_in_the_British...
I very deliberately used the word Norse instead of Norman. 150 years is sod all time for "cultural" change, 1000 odd years ago. Nowadays we have all this jingoistic, nationalistic bollocks going on. The articles on HN reflect this:
"British scientists discover their own arses", "Russian scientists forget humanitarianism", "Chinese scientologists discover Pi three million years ago"
Norman is a modern word and so is norse here, and both are English terms and both mean northman - ie bloke (or bird - let's not be sexist) from the "north"
Bear in mind that travelling by boat is far easier than land, when the Fosse Way hasn't been built, let alone the A38 or M5.
If you want to get to grips with the olden times, you have to lose silly modern notions of well ... everything.
Harold Godwinson was a saxon. He's talking about Harald Hadrada, a viking who invaded the North of England just before William The Bastard invaded from the South.
How odd is this? I noticed something odd in Mandarin:
cow: niu 牛
beef: niu rou 牛肉
sheep: yang 羊
mutton: yang rou 羊肉
pig: zhu 猪
pork: rou 肉 [it's possible to specify 猪肉, but not necessary]
deer: lu 鹿
venison: lu rou 鹿肉
And some where the distinction doesn't exist in English:
chicken (animal): ji 鸡
chicken (food): ji rou 鸡肉 [English pullet refers to the animal, not the meat]
goat (animal): yang 羊
goat (food): yang rou 羊肉
But there's also this one:
jellyfish (animal): shuimu 水母
jellyfish (food): haizhe 海蜇
Yes, I'm aware of that. (It isn't restricted to meat; it will also, much like the English word "flesh", refer to the flesh of fruit.)
> Under no circumstance is the character by itself ever directly denotes pork.
But this is just false. The character by itself directly denotes pork. It's not an unusual use.
The constructions with 肉 are not being given as examples of using a different word for the animal and the food. They all use the same word.
The example was the one at the end of the list, 水母 vs 海蜇.
Exactly: you can't "steal" a word, because when Language B borrows a word from Language A, Language A still has that word.
It's just like copying digital data: if I download a copy of Movie A, the studio hasn't lost a copy of it, so it's not "stolen".
It's not _that_ unusual to have different words for the meat and the animal. The slightly odd thing about English is that the word for the animal comes from Germanic roots and the word for the meat comes from the French root.
Weirdly enough, Japanese sort of has the same situation: the word for "cow": 牛 (pronounced "ushi") and the word for "beef": 牛肉 (pronounced "gyuuniku") being a loan word from Chinese.
In catalan still is -xocolata- close nough
Turkey also borrowed the "qahwa" (meaning coffee) from Arabic but since there's no "w" in Turkish, it became "kaveh".
Later the word "coffee" spread to European through Turkey to Dutch, then English and the rest of the world now use the word coffee [1]. The strange thing is that now even in Arab world like Saudi, most of the young people use the word "coffee" rather than original "qahwa". This is one of the rare situations where the original loaner now become the borrower. The only saving grace is that the best coffee type is still Arabica.
It's also very interesting to note that the popular and universal English word "cafe" as in cafeteria also derived from the Arabic word "qahwa", perhaps from the summary of the word for coffee house [2].
[1] From Qahwa to Coffee:
https://arabiconline.eu/arabic-coffee-qahwa/
[2] Coffee and qahwa: How a drink for Arab mystics went global:
And I suppose there were computers in the 1960s, but I doubt it had anything to do with it. ISTR the "explanation" (conjecture) was US culture, GIs all over the place, and WWII. But I also remember reading that it came from west Africa, though that is not contradictory with the spread-by-US-ubiquity theory.
Weird thing is that it’s only about 200 years old and seemingly American in origin. I would have guessed that a Sanskrit word like khanda aka “candy” or something like “chai“ would have spread faster and longer ago.
Quite confusing, but it seems to work?
I'm not sure we can conclude that? Borrowings can displace existing words, so the current state of the vocabulary doesn't necessarily tell you what was there before.
As a slightly related example in German: 'Base' and 'Vetter' for your girl and boy cousins have been replaced in the last few decades with the French borrowings 'Cousine' (also spelled 'Kusine') and 'Cousin' (also spelled 'Kuseng'). Looking just at the current vocabulary, you might conclude that German did not have specific words for these people until the French come along.
Germans also replaced 'Muhme' and 'Oheim' with 'Tante' and 'Onkel'.
Fun aside: the English word 'boss' has etymological ties with the German 'Base'. (English got 'boss' from Dutch.)
consider all the sounds humans can produce
now ask yourself
1) amongst them, if p and d are close (there is no world in which the answer to that is "no")
2) if there are real life examples of languages shifting between them or using them interchangeably (there are, papa and dada being a prime example)
"In linguistics, mama and papa are considered a special case of false cognates. In many languages of the world, sequences of sounds similar to /mama/ and /papa/ mean "mother" and "father", usually but not always in that order."
No idea where that came from, but we understood pretty quickly.
I once asked this question to a friend, and after a while he said "OK, I give up", without realizing that he had just answered the riddle.
Joking aside, I think beer is a very universal word. It's probably come from the Proto-Indo-European origin, meaning meaning "brewer's yeast".
[1] Beer In Other Languages:
We also having a toddler so we buy lots of toys (that have to have lots of disclaimers and warnings in many languages to reduce liability).
The word that I have seen that is the same in the greatest number of languages is "slime". It was basically the same in the greater than 30 or so languages I saw it translated into.
I think it is a word that no one wants to claim and make theirs, I suppose.
I was going to say it is a new word and that that is the reason it is the same in many languages, which I think is probably true - but it shouldn't be. Because after all slime grows on many things that are decomposing.
Sushi, for the most part, is seafood raw, and gimbap often has heavily marinated beef or other non-fish meat.
Yes. But if you put an authentic Korean gimbap in front of your average English speaker, they'll call it Sushi.
When 19th century Germans talked about railways, they mostly used English loanwords. But gradually most of those have been replaced with more 'native' creations.
আম or Āma
which is similar to the Hindi/Urdu word Aam (आम in Devanagari script) (آم in Urdu script).
>> Like chai vs tea, the two words (that I know of) are aam and mango.
I was referring to either aam or mango being a word that's common in many languages throughout the world, like chai and tea. So, আম or Āma is similar enough to Aam (आम or آم).
Actually, there is: Japanese (and Korean)!
The English word 'sushi' can be translated into Japanese as 'sushi' or 'sashimi' or even 'gimbap'. (Careful English speakers also use the borrowings 'sashimi' and 'gimbap' etc, but casual English speakers will refer to all of these and more as just 'sushi'.)
Similar to how Kindergarten means different things in English and German.
Am I missing something?
Kindergarten to Germans: usually its own establishment, available but not mandatory from age 3, usually has fees in the 200 EUR/mo range for all day with hot lunch (with further subsidies for poorer families), rather like an American preschool for ages 3-5, with the 5-6 year (“Vorschuljahr”) being more like American kindergarten.
Btw, Singaporean English uses Kindergarten in yet another subtle different meaning. They distinguish day care and Kindergarten.
Perhaps simpler: naively German Brot and English bread are the same words. Similar for German Kuchen and English Cake.
But there are lots of things that an English speaker might call bread, that a German speaker might call Kuchen. (Brioche might be one such example.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenvalues_and_eigenvectors#H... seems to confirm the German origins, citing David Hilbert and Hermann von Helmholtz as originators of the word.
https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saj%C3%A1tvektor_%C3%A9s_saj%C...
I feel like if I heard children speak in a foreign language, I wouldn't be able to understand if they made fun of someone in a way that need no cultural context, somehow.
Sunday Sun Sōlis Hēlíou 日曜日
Monday Moon Lūnae Selḗnēs 月曜日
Tuesday Mars Mārtis Áreōs 火曜日
Wednesday Mercury Mercuriī Hermoû 水曜日
Thursday Jupiter Iovis Diós 木曜日
Friday Venus Veneris Aphrodítēs 金曜日
Saturday Saturn Sāturnī Krónou 土曜日
In fact, one could argue that in its place, naming after the days of a fortnight is more intuitive : since it coincides with the phases of the moon. Indeed, the Sanskrit way of naming days (not used popularly except in religious and astrological settings) uses a 15-day system, two in a month: The waxing phase is called the Shukla Paksha (the white part) and the waning phase is called the Krishna Paksha (the dark part):
In Lithuanian 'arbarta' colloquially refers to all types of hot water infused drinks, there isn't any distinction of what kind of leaf or fruit (e.g. raspberry or buckthorn tea) is used.
On the other hand, the consensus in English is that where wasn't a word for this type of drink, you just used the herb's name itself.
They weren’t called teas though. tê is the name in Hokkien and that’s where all the similar-sounding names for tea come from originally… in countries where tea was originally brought from China via sea. The Polish name herbata was coined in the XVIIth century specifically for camelia sinensis, but due to general ignorance about what it actually was beyond “an infusion from some weed with medical applications” the word lost precision.
Well other than Chinese and Arabic (which also use very different words for "taxi" than most other widely spoken languages).
Btw my other candidate is "chihuahua" (though there's probably other dog breeds...). And yes it's the essentially the same in Chinese and Arabic if Google translate is to be believed.
Japanese also has different words for what English speakers would call 'sushi'.
https://translate.google.de/?sl=de&tl=zh-CN&text=robot
Meaning:
的士, "taxi", Cantonese dik-si, a transparent loan from English.
tea - tea (different pronunciation) pineapple - ananász orange - narancs taxi - taxi (slightly different pronunciation) tomato - paradicsom
now let's look at the article's champions coffee - kávé chocolate - csokoládé
both the same origin, but distorted so much, that i could not order those things in starbucks...
so in my books, taxi is the winner
I'm guessing the words you mentioned are all close because they are modern. In the same way that many words that have entered Japanese in the last 200 years are actually English or Portuguese words brought in by foreigners and adapted to the local pronunciation. You can cheat so much in Japanese by simply learning to read katakana and finding all the English words.
Hungarian’s closest relatives are Khanty and Mansi. While Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian are indeed in the same Uralic language family, they were at the very opposite ends of the dialect continuum that ultimately produced that language family, and they no longer bear any close relationship.
> Exceptions: Italian uses pomodoro, and some other languages use a word similar to the Italian one. Mandarin Chinese is another exception!
"paradicsom" is not similar to pomodoro, in either pronounciation or meaning.
And if the author has made one so simple mistake, we have to assume there are many more with the more exotic languages.
Edited to add: According to Wikipedia [0], the original Hungarian expression was also "apple of paradise," which then got shortened to just paradiscom. It also points out that the Italian pomodoro is literally "apple of gold." I guess the far-flung origins were thought of as paradisical...
[0] https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradicsom_(n%C3%B6v%C3%A9nyfa...
If you ever wanted to do a little research on something like that, I'd read your write up.
does a sign language have words, in the sense that a spoken language does, that could be shared with a spoken language and aren't simply a transliteration of a spoken-language word into signing? from the example in the article, is there any way that a sign language could share the word for coffee, or we could say that the sign for pineapple was more like pineapple vs more like ananas? or is the sign simply a sign, that could never be compared to a spoken word?
In ASL, there are some words where you just spell it out. But most things have their own dedicated sign, or maybe a compound of a couple of signs, or a sign that looks -almost- like a related concept but with a modifier (it almost feels like Chinese in that respect). The sign usually represents some aspect of what you're describing (as an example, "banana" is signed by peeling an imaginary banana).
ASL grammar is nothing like English, and has concepts that have no verbal equivalent. Conjugation works completely differently, and it's common for sentences to have a directional component and/or a facial-expression component.
Cat - gato - katze - qOt
This, like the case of shai/tea implies that the animal expanded rather late and quickly from the same region (Asia?)
Mobile phone, giraffe, etc. sound and are written also similar in all Arabic and Latin scripts.
You can download the translations from the HTML source of any Wikipedia article and put them on a spreadsheet, if that’s what you’re into
Not that spämmi isn't used as word as well.
And it makes sense - it's the "how much?" that would be (and is) asked at any port and travelling hub.
The word 'Tarif' exists in German but it's used in different contexts, eg for collective bargaining agreements between labour unions and employers.
There's taryfa but it's mostly used as a slang word for taxi or any kind of constant payment for a service with slightly mocking tone.
There's also taryfikator which is the word for the list of fines for speeding tickets depending on the speed :)
In English, it's turkey, in reference to it's supposed origin from Turkey.
In French it's dinde, which could be viewed as d'Inde, or "from India".
In Arabic it's "habash" which refers to the Horn of Africa.
Clearly one of the most confused birds around ...
For non-English speakers it translates to: "Attempting to convince a group of people who are already convinced of something"
Anyone have an example in another language?
English: Preach to the [already] converted.
Very equivalent.
This is really not a common expression.
Similarly giving redundant advice but with the added connotation of the advisor being less knowledgable on the matter.
Also, in Hebrew an orange is a "tapuz" (תפוז), which is short for "tapuach zahav", or a "golden apple" [https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%AA%D7%A4%D7%95%D7%96]. A pity that this isn't highlighted, given that Hebrew is supported in Duolingo.
I know other languages and cultures have slight variations but the ending sound as far as I have seen is the same.
That being said, what is a word anyways? You could argue that they're well understood units of language that convey meaning, which I would argue is pretty much a word
I don't think that's a good criterion, because it would exclude a lot of loanwords.
Huh? Japanese people have the same vocal tracts as Germans who have the same vocal tracts as Egyptians. Just because someone's native languages don't have a particular sound or sound combination doesn't mean they can't learn.
That's especially true for sound combinations: a Turkish speaker might find a word that doesn't follow Turkish vowel harmony a bit weird, but would have no trouble pronouncing it even without any training.
And even if a particular speaker can't produce a certain word, they can still recognise it as a word when someone else uses it in the context of their language.
As an example, most English speakers I know can't pronounce 'kn' like in Germany 'Knie' or 'Knecht'. But I can say "Knie is German for knee." and that is a sentence of five words. Or "The Knesset is the unicameral legislature of Israel."
(Just to be clear, English has words like knee or knight that are spelled with kn, but the k is silent. If you ask English speaker to pronounce "Knie" the German way, they tend to introduce something like a Schwa between the k and the n sounds.)
See https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/151054/why-is-the-k-...
That's not true at all. Have a look at eg how Turkish borrows from English.
Turkish borrows eg the word 'computer' wholesale without modification. Despite that word violating Turkish vowel harmony. (Unless you want to tell me that vowel harmony is not part of Turkish 'phonemic structure'?)
Similarly lots of German borrowings from English in recent decades don't adjust to German 'phonemic structure'. Eg German typically pronounces st at the beginning of a word like sht, but that only happens in the borrowing 'Stress' for some speakers. (See the IPA on https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Stress for evidence.)
"Fight" is a word in english, but the loan word in japanese is pronounced "faito" because the language demands that all words end in either a vowel or syllabic 'N'. Japanese people are capable of saying english words without ending them in a vowel, but then they're speaking english, not japanese.
The word for salmon roe in japanese is 'ikura'. This is a loan word from russian: 'ikra' for caviar. But because of the Consonant-Vowel structure of the language, a 'u' was added when the word was borrowed.
One of the funniest examples is when a word is borrowed by japanese speakers and then gets translated back into english, the translators won't always return it to the original form. The name Lily would be pronounced "Riri" in japanese (japanese speakers might not even notice the difference between R and L because they're the same phoneme), and when it's translated back into english, it might come back as "Really". This has been a source of consternation for video game players before.
Likewise, when american english speakers borrow a word from a language with a trill or rolling R, they make it conform to the phonemic structure of the language by changing to a retroflex R.
And these sorts of examples are found everywhere. Every language has a particular structure for how valid words can be formed, and speakers of the language will modify foreign words to fit the sounds they're trained to emit unless they're consciously trying to speak a different language.
It's also a source of consternation for people who consume Japanese media. There is a particularly funny example in the franchise Ah! My Goddess, in which the demon Maaraa (named after the Buddhist demon whose name in Sanskrit is Maara) gets "translated" into English as "Marller".
It's easy to see how a Japanese person went from the Japanese name to the English one - long Japanese vowels are taken as indicating English rhotic vowels, and then the fact that it would be strange for a rhotic vowel to be followed by an R hints that the Japanese R should be interpreted as an English L - but it's not exactly well-motivated by the actual name of the demon. (And while it might make sense to Japanese speakers attempting to make English out of Japanese, it makes much less sense to English speakers attempting to do the same thing - we hear "maaraa" as "mara" and view the Japanese derhotification of our rhotic vowels as a mistake, not an equivalence.)
By the way, it's worth observing that that is a requirement of the kana writing system, but it's not a requirement of the language. [It also isn't a requirement of the kanji writing system, in which a symbol can indicate any arbitrary sequence of sounds, but that system is difficult to use for purposes of indicating pronunciation.] There are circumstances in which high vowels are entirely deleted, the most prominent example being the ordinary pronunciation of です /desɯ/ with no final vowel at all.
The fact that "fight" gets borrowed as "faito" also looks like an artifact of the spelling system - /o/ is not a high vowel and can't be deleted, but in native Japanese there is no tu syllable - that space in the syllabary is occupied by the affricated tsu, so loanwords that originally ended in /t/ or /d/ are given the final vowel /o/ instead. Illiterate Japanese might or might not interpret the English sound of "fight" the same way.
Really would strongly recommended it, he is one of the most entertaining people that I have ever listened to.
1. Coffee
2. Chocolate
But my winner words are the two words all humans learn without being told: abba and umma which what babies actually say universally us ba or da and ma when referring to their father and mother. Adult languages take these words and add to them like with english it is pa or pappa or dad for father and mom or mommy or momma for mother. But I challenge anyone to find me babies that don't use those words or languages without an evolved form of those root words.
Pfffffttttt
Actually two words for pineapple: 凤梨 & 菠萝
On the topic, I think one word is defintely the same in all languages: "OK". Yeah, even in Mandarin.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/8lefir/why_doe...
Pizza Sushi Cola Vodka Gin Kebab Grill
Another category would be modern inventions/phenomena like Internet Sms Selfie
Yet another would be countries which are well known, but with not so many cultural mixes (e.g. not Germany), e.g. Peru Australia Sudan
This rule isn't absolute, though: coffee has a (rarely-used) kanji version, and tobacco ("tabako") is written in hiragana, as is tempura. Sometimes if the word is old enough, it gets treated as a native word.
Similarly tamatar in Hindi isn't like tomato (resp. tomate, etc.) because of some Proto-Indo-European root, it's just a devanagari approximation of the Portuguese.
I assume the intent in asking 'are they all romance languages' is 'do they all get it from Latin', to which the answer is certainly yes even if the language as a whole is mainly not.
E.g.:
https://www.tasteatlas.com/most-popular-breads-in-afghanista...
There is one called bolani.
These are all from the same language family (the indo-european language family), so it's no wonder that there are still noticeable similarities in a word this fundamental even after thousands of years of divergence.
>non-European languages
"European" languages isn't a particularly good category, since europe has a wide range of languages that don't belong to the indo-european language family, such as basque and the uralic languages, of which there are too many to list in europe, but some notable ones include hungarian, finnish, and estonian.
For reference, the word for "no" in finnish is completely different: "ei", but it conjugates similarly to a verb, so it's "en/et/ei/emme/ette/eivät" depending on the person and number. In the very closely related estonian language this system has already eroded away and left only "ei", and in colloquial finnish a similar process is already underway and the "emme/eivät" forms have already disappeared.
Jo - no
Po - yes
Or thats what Ive gathered after ten years of marriage.
Naahi or Nako in Marathi
Naa in Gujarati
Illai in Tamil
Illaa in Kannada
Allaa in Malayalam (both are palindromes :)
Naa in Bengali
etc.
https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=gu&text=no&op=transla...
Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam are all Dravidian.
It's a Hebrew word: "אָמֵן"
[1]: https://uesz.nytud.hu/index.html?uuid=a95e306a-7590-1014-865...
Orange = tapuz (which is 2 words mashed together, tapuach (apple) & zahav (gold))
Taxi = monit
Tomato = agvania
I think “Sinaasappel” is still the more common name for the fruit in the Netherlands.
It also appears to be a very old word as I saw a documentary about the Hittites and the interviewee stated that they may have migrated from Europe.
Germanic - wasser/water/voda/woda
French - eau
Italian/Spanish - aqua/agua
Greek - nero (νερό)
Danish - vand
Romanian - apă
Latvian - udens
Turkish - su
Welsh - dwrThe Romanian and French both comes from the latin aqua, just like the Italian/Spanish.
Looking into it a bit more, the French is also from the latin source (aqua) - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eau
"Kaput" is another.
I have no idea what “kaput” means…
"kaputt" is a rather colloquial German word for "broken".
My stance as a native German speaker: don't use it in written German, and avoid it in spoken German, too, since you will appear somewhat uneducated (remark: in spoken German, you typically use a more formal language register than in spoken English).
Possibly either "broken" (German) or perhaps "head" (Latin). Kaput is also an English borrow word from German. I've thrown in kaput/capit(a) for a laugh!
Of course if you want to say "Of the languages that have a word for X, then is the word more or less the same?", then "taxi" might count. It's even the same in German, a language that intentionally chose words that were not cognates: Fernseher for TV, Fernsprecher for telephone, Handy for cell phone.
One funny thing is that some brands (like McDonald's) are actually translated / changed in some countries or languages
Watching YouTube videos in different languages and eventually you hear “subscribe”
He was a high school physics teacher.
It's the first word that I use in 4 different language "wordle" games.
I wouldn't be surprised if a whole bunch of African or Native American languages happened to have entirely unrelated words for "no", although I don't speak those.
Of course there are exceptions, but all the examples in this article are dumb because they're just mostly modern words where the english version of it just gets copied. I guess I'm just more interested in the old stuff.
There are several large language families outside of the Indo-European one that are distinct enough that it's hard to see nearly all of them actually sharing the same words except for relatively modern loan words, or possibly onomatopoeia.
It's not particularly surprising that something like "no" would be short in most languages, considering that it's a very common interjection, but that doesn't mean it's the same.
(The top examples in the article are originally from Arabic and Nahuatl, and the spread of both words is old enough that it predates the hegemony of English, and I think many languages probably got their equivalent of "chocolate" via other Indo-European languages instead. I'm not sure the other examples are actually cases of an English version being copied either. Spanish, German, French, Portuguese etc. were significant enough international languages not that many centuries ago that English probably wasn't most likely conduit for loan words that are nowadays commonly shared. It certainly wasn't the only one. Of course nowadays it tends to be a predominant one.)
A computer is called "Ordinateur", Bytes are called "Octets" (and prefixed with the usual kO, MO, ... IIRC). Bits are surprisingly called Bits
As I verified that, I discovered that the actor who played Ba'al in Stargate SG-1 died a couple years ago. No word about his symbiont.
Words of Arabic origin
For reasons I haven't been able to figure out, some modern Indian languages (like Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi) call it 'cheeni' which is the same word to refer to someone as Chinese. Other languages use variations of the Sanskrit 'sakhar', 'sakkare'
At least the first two words are different in German:
- TV: [der] Fernseher
- WiFi: WLAN (Wi-Fi is rather a trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance; in my observation spreading the usage of this trademark was mostly successful in the USA)
> https://genius.com/Nina-hagen-band-tv-glotzer-white-punks-on...
you realize that this song is about some lowly educated proll who watches TV all day. By deliberately using quite some colloquial and unsophisticated words and phrasings in the lyrics, the singer/songwriter sends a very clear message how much TV dulled this person's mind.
I'll better look for a different nonsensical bit taken from another song :)
Mandarin chinese: 公共汽車 (gōnggòng qìchē)
Kawa is borrowed from Ottoman Turkish kahve just like most of the other European words for coffee.