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Comment by Delk | Hacker News Reader

Robot intuitively sounds like it could be a good candidate.

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

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Robot isn't even an old word - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.

It arguably is: <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=R.U.R.&oldid=1172...>

“In Czech, robota means forced labour of the kind that serfs had to perform on their masters' lands and is derived from rab, meaning "slave".”

This is an incorrect interpretation by people who want to see Karel Čapek's play "R.U.R."(Rossum's Universal Robots), which famously introduced the word "robot" into the English language, this way. While the root "robot" in Slavic languages goes back to "rab" for slaves, Robotnik (Russian/Polish), Robota (Czech) etc. has simply meant "worker" for ages, without any connotation to forced labour.

Fun fact: The word "slave" is derived from "Slavic people".

That smells like propaganda to me, sure, the automaton is a worker, but also a slave.

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.

In Icelandic "computer" is tölva, a portmanteau of the words for number and seeress.

That's amazing :

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/t%C3%B6lva

"A portmanteau word, coined by Sigurður Nordal in 1965 from tala (“number”) +‎ völva (“prophetess”)."

Or simi for telephone. Another near universal word would be police, wouldn't it? Iceland of course is one of the exceptions!

I found those fun facts about Icelandic very fascinating when I first visited decades ago as a teenager.

Is 'police' that universal? I know Irish have the Gardaí - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garda_S%C3%ADoch%C3%A1na.

Yes, Icelandic has 'Lögreglu' and Greece has Αστυνομία (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenic_Police) but indeed most places use some variant of 'police'.

`Gardaí` is more of a formal name for a specific insitution. The Irish language still has the more generic word `póilín`, which appears to be at least phonetically related to the english `police`.

Police is Rendőrség in Hungarian, translating to something like “order guard establishment” (-ség corresponds to -ness or -ery suffix in English, more or less, like “pékség” is bakery)

They go out of their way to make new words rather than borrowing. Or at least they used to. That may have started to change in more recent times.

And robot is vélmenni, machine man. Very resistant to loan words.

Computer in French is called "Ordinateur". I think robot might be a strong candidate for an universal term.

Internet has to also be pretty up there. IIRC some languages do have their own word for it (and the Académie Française sure would like us to as well) but overall I think a lot of the world just uses the English word.

Computer in Chinese is 电脑 (dian nao) literally "electric brain".

This is inaccurate. Computer is “计算机” （computing machine），while “电脑” mostly refers to PC, even though they are sometimes used interchangeably the latter is distinctively narrower than "computer" while the former is equivalent.

And robot is 機器人, literally machine man. Mandarin is weird about loan words. Where the Japanese will gobble up any word and incorporate it into “Japanese,” Chinese goes through some complicated hoops to come up with a word etymologically rooted in Chinese. However, in practice everyone I know says “email” instead of 電子郵件.

Japanese used to do this thing too -- back then Kanji was still the proper scholarly thing to use and scholars were the main contact to Western knowledge. In fact, a good number of Chinese words for Western concepts came from Japanese translations. 社会 society, 经济学 economy, 自由 liberty all came from Japanese translations.

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/漢語中的日語借詞

I think it's because Japan was the first to adopt western education. It's why people you wouldn't expect to be were educated in Japan, like the founder of the CPC or Chiang Kai Shek

> come up with a word etymologically rooted in Chinese

So here's an interesting point: etymologically, Chinese is the only evolving language other than English.

Chinese and Japanese = formally 電子計算機 (electronic calculating machine), everyday language uses a transliteration of "computer" in Japanese and 電脳 "electric brain" in Chinese.

電腦 in Chinese (rather than Japanese) characters to be pendantic :)

Chinese: 电脑 Diannao, lit. Electric brain

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