These seem like very bad candidates. All are loan words, which is interesting, but we could go deeper if we're considering pineapple/ananas and coffee. And let's be real, words like robot and computer are mostly the same in this respect too, especially if we're considering taxi. But what about words that are more "native"?
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)
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.
> My understanding is that these are pretty early words and need to be pronounceable by infants.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
`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`.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Even in Eurasia, I think there are languages like Mongolian - "eej" is mother in Mongolian. But the general premise that these are the simplest words for babies is still possible : eej is mother, aav, father.
Japanese has a lot of words for mother and unlike in English with mom, mommy and mother, they aren’t related.
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.
Japanese has mama and papa, but only as relatively recent loanwords. The closest (at least phonetically, though not necessarily in usage) native equivalents are haha and chichi
The origin of "anne" is "ana" (/ˈa.na/), though, which is closer to "mama". Also it is hypothesized that "ana" was derived from the babble word "nana".
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).
Is this similar to the name Annie? Or more like "ah-knee"? Either way, interesting note! I'm just really surprised that these words are similar across such varieties of languages. Like the fact that you have Asia, Europe, Africa, and from what I can find even the mama is similar in Cherokee[0]. So that's all continents! To me that's crazy. And extra fucking interesting that there appears to be (from my non-expert point of view) higher variance in papa than mama, and by a lot.
It’s similar to a stereotypical Canadian saying “on, eh?”
eru’s response gives the best understanding though, as there’s no perfect English pronunciation of anne.
In Turkish Computer is "Bilgisayar" => "Info Counter". History of it is pretty nice. In the early days of Turkish Republic, with a push From M.Kemal Ataturk, Latin Alphabet is adopted. After that there was a movement towards using "Native Turkish" words instead of the adopted ones from other languages.
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)..
and "uncle" in hindi (mother's brother, specifically; hindi has different words for various kinds of uncle/aunt/grandparent depending on the path through the family tree)
Fun fact, there is a thing called a "noun class" which some people use synonymously with "grammatical gender"[0]. (not all noun classes are gendered) Personally I always liked the former term better because really just from a statistical point of view it doesn't make sense to me to call the "gender" conjugations gender based. There's far more inanimate objects that have a g̶e̶n̶d̶e̶r̶ categorical class than there are people, so I think it is more clear that you share the same categorical class as a table/chair/spoon/whatever than you do with the gender. I mean no French person thinks a vagina is masculine[1]. It always made more sense to me that the category is based on sound rather than gender because no person is really internalizing the gender of an inanimate object except for that one study that couldn't be replicated[2], so our brains don't seem to be placing strong connections on those (but do create strong connections with sounds).
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.
Gender comes from french genre, latin genus, same origin as generic and and means class/kind/sort it just shifted in meaning and now doesn't fit that well anymore.
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.
Noun class is a benefit for reliable communication, and that's why most languages evolved (and kept) those mechanisms.
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"
> Languages are optimized firstly for the people that speak it as their first language.
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.
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?
don't mean to nitpick but not sure where you're getting Japanese from, in Japanese mama is Okaasan or Haha and Otousan or Chichi for dada. (I don't know the evolution of either of the words, it may be that they were closer to mama and dada in the past or distant past, but contemporar Japanese doesn't fit the pattern)
Perhaps, it would be more useful for students if foreign language courses start with explaining one thing that is well known to linguists, but maybe does not have enough recognition by a wide audience.
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.
> [...], but because centuries ago these nations speak one single common language that has diverge in centuries into different dialects.
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.
>influenced what would later become French and Spanish
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.
If you're familiar with ancient and medieval European history, you're pretty much familiar with the origins of most of the European languages.
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]).
> 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).
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.
I'm much less familiar with Eastern European history but that appears to be due to another wave of migration in early medieval Europe where Slavic peoples who originally lived further east moved into those areas after the Huns drove the Germanic tribes westward.[0]
That's an amazing piece of history I was not familiar with. I have recently travelled around the area between Belarus, Czech Republic, Lithuania and Austria and their history is obviously complex and interlinked, but I only saw in the museums the history starting from around 1000 years ago... I didn't consider that much of this region, which today includes mostly slavs, had not actually been populated by slavs just a few centuries before the history I was looking at (literally) which starts more or less with the Rus, Vikings (which apparently initially ruled Kievan Rus[1], despite the region being already slav at around the time ~800AD!), Bavarians and Balts to the north (which became the Grand Duchy of Lithuania later - which for some time actually extended to now-Russian Smolensk, covering most of today's Belarus and a part of today's Russia!)
But there's a word for "all of the Eastern Roman Empire, except for the parts that are not Greece". We just call that "Greece". Greek used to be the language of the Eastern Roman Empire, and it was almost completely extirpated; it is not a good example of persistence.
I severely underestimated how long it would take for me to learn Japanese based on my experience of learning English while being a native Portuguese speaker.
English felt like a very different language but underneath it is so much closer in comparison.
Before I had clicked the link I thought you were not referring to Proto-Indo-European but to Standard Average European — how many of the European languages (particularly the western European languages) have peculiarities in grammar and syntax that are not explained by descent, but by areal features. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European
"OK is frequently used as a loanword in other languages. It has been described as the most frequently spoken or written word on the planet." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK
As a kid back in the 60s I noticed that I heard this word a lot in southeast Asia, Europe, Australia and the USA. I think I noticed it because I read in a few books that it was used a lot.
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.
Ok was popular way before computers became a thing, as I grew up in a small Asian village before either computers or cellphones were a thing. Maybe it's the other way around. Ok is so used in computers because it is familiar to everyone
This is the correct answer. Listen to any conversation in any language and it inevitably pops up.
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.
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].
How is that different than "chocolate" simply being a Spanish word which is very popular? Stealing words from other languages is arguably how most words get created.
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.
> 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.
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.
Speaking of oddities, Korean gogi (고기) means either "meat" (beef, pork, chicken, etc.) or "fish" the animal, but not the fish on your dish (which is saengseon 생선), because otherwise it would be too confusing.
> English is a bit odd due to having several different words for an animal and its flesh via the Norse invasion in 1066.
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.
I think you failed to realize that 肉 just means "meat", in the most general sense possible. Under no circumstance is the character by itself ever directly denotes pork. So there's really nothing odd about saying "chicken meat" or "cow meat" when you want to specifically specify the flesh of the animal for consumption.
No. The Normans had been in Normandy for a long time and were quite distinct from the Norse. The Normans had been there for 150 years before they invaded South East England at pretty much the same time that Harald Hardrade was trying to invade the North East. The latter were Norse.
Harold was a Saxon king and I think you got former and latter reversed.
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 was a Saxon king and I think you got former and latter reversed
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.
I think the line is _very_ thin, but I think I understand what OP means:
"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_.
I can’t really explain why or how and my fellow countrymen could reasonably disagree with me, but „okej” to me has slightly negative/aggressive connotation?
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
It's tricky because the pronunciation in English and Scandinavian languages (no idea about Polish) would be pretty much the same between OK/ok and okay/okei/okej (Swedish also uses okej; Norwegian okei) unless you spell out the "OK" which you sometimes do, sometimes don't in Norwegian at least (it's hard to tell because people might spell it out using English pronunciation), but my feeling is that especially if you intend the letters "O.K.", whether or not you spell it out, it tends to have a more positive, confirmatory sense, while if you use the word "okei" in Norwegian, you have more room to alter the pronunciation to imply sarcasm or doubt, e.g. stretching the syllables.
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.
Politeness is a whole topic on its own in linguistics.
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.
My first thought was "mama" (and possibly "dada"), as I believe I've seen it attributed to the fact it's an easy word for babies to make since it mimics the first sounds we make. But it's not even mentioned..
"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."
Plosives are a big category. "k" is also a plosive, but does not sound anything like a <d> or <p>. d and p are plosives but are made using completely different parts of the mouth (dental vs labial). Perhaps some linguist will consider them "close" but "near identical" is almost certainly wrong, but I am happy to be proven wrong with a citation.
Quickly glossing over index diachronica, there's no common sound change of p<->d, but p<-b->m with the medial b has instances. (sorry for the syntax, no idea how to express this)
The word for grandma is "isoäiti", at least in sentences like "I went to visit my grandma last weekend". Monikers such as "mummo" are borrowed from Swedish, which means that not too long ago, the finnish language seems to have been without any "mama"-related words. Which is more interesting than the fact that some of those have been borrowed into modern day finnish, since it shows that "mama" is not a universal feature of all languages.
> Monikers such as "mummo" are borrowed from Swedish, which means that not too long ago, the Finnish language seems to have been without any "mama"-related words.
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.)
I’ve never heard “Base” (only “Kusine”) for female cousin, but still usually hear “Vetter” for male cousin, and “Vettern” for multiple cousins of mixed gender.
Our Finnish child learned to say "äiti" for mother pretty early on. But his first real word was when he started saying "mama" - meaning he wanted milk.
No idea where that came from, but we understood pretty quickly.
This is a very popular modern riddle/joke, "The most understood word in the world is Coke (Coca-Cola), what is the second most popular word?", and the correct answer is "OK".
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".
Coffee fails the test in my locale which is interestingly the supposed origin[0] of the drink/plant. We call it Buna in Ethiopia and it's a big symbol/part of the national identity not to mention the most important export commodity.
This sort of makes sense, almost everyone else in the world learnt of coffee directly or indirectly via Arab-speaking people and so use their name for it, but Ethopians had it first and so have their own word for it.
“Huh?” Is strong candidate, if you accept it is a word. Here is a fun talk in the subject https://youtu.be/rHHJ3hSppEA?feature=shared
It seems the demands of asking for clarification in conversation shapes the word to be easy and fast to pronounce.
After being an amateur linguist for quite a while and living in Switzerland, where everything you buy is translated into at least 3 if not more like dozens languages for toys I recently noticed a word that was the same in dozens of 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.
I believe mango is another candidate for a word that's nearly the same in many languages. Like chai vs tea, the two words (that I know of) are aam and mango.
Yep, "mango" is surprisingly consistent across every language I checked, but in Bengali and possibly quite a few other similar widely spoken languages it's different. Whereas "sushi" I haven't found a language using a distinct word for so far.
> Whereas "sushi" I haven't found a language using a distinct word for so far.
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.
Kindergarten to Americans: when most children start elementary school, usually age 5 (maybe 6 if their parents didn’t think they were quite ready), Grade 0. What Germans would call “Vorschuljahr” (last year of Kindergarten, where there’s less play and more learning how to count, recognize letters, and sit still at a table)
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.
The Kindergarten to Germans you're describing seems like the "Kita": https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindertagesst%C3%A4tte - but the whole education system is very confusing and it's generally not language-specific but more culturally specific AFAIK
I think OP was saying that similar to the words Tea/Chai that originated from different parts of China and spread to the rest of the world, the words Aam (from Indo-Aryan) and Mango (from Dravidian) originated in different parts of India and spread to rest of the world.
>> 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).
I tried that theory with quite a few things that didn't "exist" per se in Chinese, yet there were distinct Chinese words for them.
Plus there are plenty of food items from other cultures where we tend to use a native equivalent in English (spring rolls, rice paper rolls, sweet and sour pork, Swedish meatballs etc). Though to be fair we tend just to borrow the word wholesale. Not sure to what degree other languages have consistently done the same.
Oh, true. But it's still a different word for (something like) 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.
Sushi is a method of preparing rice with vinegar, usually then eaten with Nori (seaweed), and often combined with other ingredients that may or may not include fish, either raw or cooked (and then served as 'finger' food).
The sushi that's most often sold outside Japan is in the form of "California rolls", which I'd say rarely include raw fish (but often includes ingredients almost never seen in sushi found in Japan, like avocado or smoked salmon or cooked chicken etc.). But the sushi rice itself is what makes it sushi.
A Dutch friend once said that the one word from his language that has had universal reach was "apartheid"... I'm sure that if there are any truly global words they are probably ones like that (initially) attached to a specific geographical context.
Slightly related. But I've seen documentaries from other remote countries, where children use the same sounds when mocking people. Not the same words, but kinda the same melody. Is it kinda universal, or was it just chance?
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.
I think of naming the days after planets (in more or less the same order) this system is due to a common source : Sumeria, and made popular by the Babylonians who used it for their astronomy and their astrology.
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):
Where the “thea” part comes from Chinese. It would be bizarre for a beverage discovered in ancient China (and brought to Europe only a couple centuries ago) to be named in latin.
Herbal teas were common in Europe before camellia sinensis tea was imported, so I find it hard to believe the Latin origin is correct.
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.
> Herbal teas were common in Europe before camellia sinensis tea was imported
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.
Any languages that use a distinctively different word for "robot"?
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.
Yes, a vacuuming robot is saodi jiqiren (literally sweeping robot). Industrial robotics are gongye jiqiren in general, although a robotic arm is more precisely a jixiebi (literally robotic arm).
"Sushi" and "jazz" seem to be good candidates too. Chinese often seems to be the language that adopts very different terms even for quite culturally specific terminology (e.g. I'd tried niqab/burqa plus a bunch of less common musical instruments or styles from other cultures and they all seemed to have their own word in Mandarin. But the word for "jazz" superficially sounds similar at least).
Yeah, pomodoro means "golden apple", paradicsom/Paradeiser comes from "paradise" (looks like Hungarians really like tomatos!), so nothing in common except that they start with "P" and the countries they are used in are roughly in the same region. Also, in Romanian a tomato is simply a "roșie" ("red") - Romanians apparently like to name fruit by their color, eggplants are called "vinete" ("purples").
Another example of this article being confidently wrong about tomato is Czech, where the word used is rajče or rajské jablko, the latter meaning "apple of paradise."
Hm, that's an interesting thought which never occurred to me until now. I didn't know about the Austrian German expression, but paradicsom in Hungarian can mean either tomato or paradise! Please chime in if you're familiar with other languages of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
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...
"Taxi" is quite different in Chinese and Arabic for a start.
I'd guess it's likely to be almost universally understood among all humans that have had exposure to the concept though.
The Hungarian language is totally different to the dialects spoken by its neighbours, which usually speak Indo-European languages. Hungarian comes from the Uralic region of Asia and belongs to the Finno-Ugric language group, meaning its closest relatives are actually Finnish and Estonian, which are two other really difficult languages for foreigners to learn because they are pretty alien compared to any other languages.
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.
> meaning its closest relatives are actually Finnish and Estonian
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.
A little pedantic, but it's worth mentioning that the assumption here is _spoken_ languages. There's a whole set of sign languages around the world as well.
I think that would also be something interesting to look into as well! Not only are spoken words borrowed, but so are signs and simple gestures. I guess you'd have to make some delineation about where the line in the sand is, since a smile could be considered a sign, and is probably (no evidence) nearly universal. Still interesting though.
If you ever wanted to do a little research on something like that, I'd read your write up.
do sign languages even have words? i understand that they have signs, and they have methods to communicate words from a spoken language. but is there a sign language that has words, not signs, that are specific to the sign language?
Sign languages are full fledged languages in their own right; they aren't simply a series of visual renditions of the words in the spoken or written language. Their grammars are often fundamentally different. E.g. ASL is closer in syntax to Japanese than it is to English.
yeah, i understand that they're not visual renditions of spoken or written words. but as far as the possibility for a sign language to share a word with a written or spoken language - how?
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?
Signs and spoken language feel very different, at least to me. ASL is definitely not "english, but with signs instead of verbal words".
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.
Do the meanings of mouth morphemes ever correspond to the mouth shapes associated with spoken morphemes in the local spoken language? (Sorry if that's incorrectly/confusingly phrased; been awhile since I cracked open a linguistics textbook.) Curious about both ASL and other sign languages, if you happen to know.
American Sign Language will borrow words through "fingerspelling," but if they're used frequently, that gets exhausting so new signs get invented. Some common signs use a handshape corresponding to the first letter of the English word of their most common use -- for example apple and pineapple use the A and P handshapes with a similar placement and motion, where banana is effectively pantomimed peeling a banana. So, some signs feel borrowed. The middle finger means in ASL what North Americans expect it to mean, and it's pointed at the ground for the interjective form (for example oh, fuck) but the sign for "intercourse" is much more graphic.
Ah, I see what you mean. I don't think so, though sign languages do sometimes have loanwords from spoken language. For instance, certain English words have made their way into ASL through finger spelled words. It's not quite a transliteration, as I understand it, but a stylized sign that originates from the transliteration. E.g. a word meaning job in ASL is a stylized j followed by a b.
Sign languages absolutely have words, they're just formed out of finger and/or hand positions + finger and/or hand movements, and sometimes facial or other body movements, rather than out of sounds (phonemes). And yes, these signed words are specific to each sign language (although there is borrowing between many sign languages, just as there is among spoken languages). Sign languages also have grammars, as do spoken languages, although the grammars of sign languages may allow for some things to be encoded simultaneously rather than sequentially, as is usually required with spoken languages.
You need to be a little bit more lenient when comparing different languages. As far as I know, “cat” shared the same build pattern in many languages: guttural-a-dental
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
The correct answer is "spam". Spam was a novel problem that hit the entire world almost at once, just as that entire world was becoming able to talk with itself easily. So an invented word was immediately adopted in all languages. Just check out the bottom of the wiktionary page.
That's an interesting one. I haven't used that word in a while but it is used across many languages. I guess maybe it's because it's most often used in the context of global trade, travel and politics which is inherently multi-lingual. It's something which affects almost everyone (hence everyone knows the word) but only a few people have control over it and use it frequently (hence there was not much incentive for people to change it as it propagated outside of its domain).
Mama and Papa are virtually the same in every language that I've been exposed to. My theory is that "babies first words" aren't actually words; "ma" and "pa" are just the easiest syllables for a baby to make and society has interpreted them as meaning mother and father.
Do you propose an explanation for why they are always this way round? Eg. you may expect some language to use 'mama' for father and 'papa' for mother based on your reasoning.
Interesting! A more direct English equivalent of that would be "teach your grandmother to suck eggs," which isn't used much these days. That's probably a good thing. I have no idea why grandmothers are supposed to be especially good at sucking eggs.
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.
Famously a common Mandarin “uh/um” filler, pinyin “nà gè,” is pronounced in ways that often confuse Americans into thinking that they have heard a racial slur.
I don't think that's a word. It's an utterance, but not a lexical one. It's not onomatopoeia, either: 'bark' is onomatopoeia, but actually barking isn't.
They're considered fillers that mark a continuance on part of the speaker so that the other participants know that they will continue speaking. Different languages not only use different sounds, but in many cases continuation markers can also be "normal" words from the language. In English some examples would be "well", or "yes" which can be pure filler words to bridge to the next utterance.
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
You make a good point. I looked it up and it's in MW and even scrabble recognizes it as an interjection. I think to be a word, at a minimum an utterance would have to conform to the phonemic structure of a language, but that's a low bar, and 'uh' passes. I guess it's a word!
It won't exclude anything. Loanwords can only be expressed in the phonemic structure of the language, because the speaker isn't capable of doing anything else.
> [...], because the speaker isn't capable of doing anything else.
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.)
A Japanese speaker can learn to speak German, but that's not the same as a loan word. Japanese is a great example for how loan words are modified to conform to the phonemic structure of a language because it absorbed so much english in the past century.
"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.
> but the loan word in japanese is pronounced "faito" because the language demands that all words end in either a vowel or syllabic 'N'.
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.
I was taught in Japanese language class that unvoiced vowels don't get entirely deleted. You're still supposed to aspirate them, which affects the pacing of the language, but it's hard to hear it because unvoiced vowels don't really make a sound.
> 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.
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.)
I'm not sure what you think you're arguing. All loanwords in every language are pronounced using the phonemic structure of the borrowing language, the one that is being used, because that is the only possibility. The fact that someone is theoretically capable, after years of study, of learning to pronounce a foreign word, is not relevant in any way.
> All loanwords in every language are pronounced using the phonemic structure of the borrowing language, the one that is being used, because that is the only possibility.
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.)
But it is a lexical utterance. The form of the filler is specific to the language you're speaking. I'm having a really hard time trying to imagine what about it you think isn't lexicalized.
In Vietnamese, "sô cô la" is chocolate, and I think it's bit of a stretch to say those are the same. Coffee is cà phê, which is good. Tea is another that doesn't work in Vietnamese (trà), but taxi is great (xe tắc xi).
There are exceptions I know of for sure to their winner words. I would have told you duolingo except you wanted an email!
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.
Aside from English, "ananas" for pineapple and "lox"; however 'lox' and 'water' are the 2 of the oldest words still in use, but not the most widespread across many languages...
The noise one makes by blowing through pursed lips (sometimes referred to as blowing a raspberry in English)
seems like a pretty universal way to indicate “fart” though it is spelled differently in various cultures
There is also an interesting contrast with the word for "butterfly" which tends to be quite different between languages[0] -- "mariposa", "papillon", "farfalla", "borboleta", and "fluture" all come from romance languages, for instance.
The article incorrectly states orange is derived from the Sanskrit word Narang नारङ्ग, but this word itself is a loan word from proto Dravidian (ancestor of Tamil) நாரம் (nāram)
I thought I learned at one point that “kaka” (poop) was one of the earliest proto-Indo-European words [0] and think it is present in many languages but “all” is a pretty high bar.
Fun thing I only recently realized, that's what the Gremlins are calling Gizmo in the movies (and just shouting in general in the recent cartoon). Apparently that word is cross-species.
I've often wondered how widespread "okay" is. I remember standing on the deck of a Washington State Ferry about 20 years ago, listening to a couple of Arabic men speaking. At the end of a long string of Arabic words, one of the men said "Okay?" with exactly the same inflection an English-speaker would, to solicit agreement, and his companion echoed "okay" in the apparent affirmative.
The interesting thing about Japanese is that, unlike most other languages, it writes loanwords differently than native words: they're written in the katakana character set rather than kanji (Chinese characters) or hiragana. So "pan" is one of these, since it was borrowed from Portuguese.
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.
My point is that it just seems like a pointless exception, it's not a coincidence with a separate etymology, it's not that oh actually they both trace their route way further back than Latin, it's just taken from a romance language, so 'really' the answer to the question is yes (on evidence so far).
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.
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.
In Persian it’s “na”. Also the words for Mother, Father, Daughter, Brother and some other primitive concepts are very similar. But it’s not really surprising.
That's because Persian is an Indo-European family language, probably. Those words are similar in many languages in that family, such as Sanskrit, Hindi, Latin, English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, etc.
As you might imagine the similarities are limited to Indo-European languages. Take Arabic for example: na'am means yes, but it resembles the words you listed for no
I recall reading about ESSO the gas company how the company tried to find a neutral name that didn't mean anything in any language. edit: but now I see it just means Standard Oil as in 'S' and 'O'.
Very surprised to see Amen not making the list. I know it is a Christian word at the end of a prayer meaning "so be it". However, even if the prayer language is changed I understand Amen to remain untranslated.
In hungarian when “[the cat is] meowing” we say “[a macska] nyávog”, which means to make sounds similar to ‘nyí’ [1].
Now that I think about it, it’s weird, because the we use “miáú” for the actual sound, but we don’t use the verb “miákol”, which apparently exists.
I would actually contend that "meow" and "nya" are pseudo-cognates, they are onomatopoeia of the same sound. M and N are both nasals, and iˈaʊ̯ and ia are close in vowel space.
This isn't the same thing, but: in most indigenous languages of Latin America where Spanish is the national language, the word for cat is something like 'mees' (or 'mis' if you use the Spanish-like spelling). This is because cats were introduced in that area by the Spaniards, and a common way to call a cat in Spanish is 'mis-mis' (like saying "here kitty kitty" in English). One exception to that is Waorani (an indigenous language of Ecuador), where the word for cat is kitty (not their spelling). I'll let you guess why.
One would think animal sounds would be basically universal but it isn't so--other than meow I can't recall any animal sound that was understandable to my wife (native Mandarin speaker.)
For an appropriate definition of "everybody on earth" as "people who read international news to sufficient depth or are otherwise well acquainted with Italy"? Many people in the world wouldn't even know Italy exists.
Orange is also fairly universal, something similar to naranja or portokáli. In English we say the word with a hard g but with a soft g as in German it sounds closer to naranja - oran-ja.
Both come from PIE "wódr" for water. Romance languages descended ftom a synonym "ekeh" which resulted in aqua/agua/eau/... and the word itself meant "a body of water" like a lake or a river iirc.
There are lots of languages in the world that don't have any word for taxi, because they don't have taxis. The same is true for many of the other words talked about here or in the article.
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.
I have no idea, but pointing to some non-working thing and saying "kaput" gets action in any language. It was a tip I picked up back in the backpacking days, and it does seem to work.
My dictionary suggests that the noun 'Schmuck' in modern German comes from the Low German adjective 'smuk' meaning beautiful; I can't even find it in an exclusively Yiddish dictionary however.
No I won't, मैं हिंदी सीख रहा हूं, what's your point anyway? You realise I was responding to English speakers claiming a non-English word wasn't used/heard of in English with my own claim that it is?
"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!
As I learned from my partner, Persian is rich in French loanwords, especially for things that were introduced at the time where French had the same status of English today. Kaput is just the Persian spelling of the French "Capote"
Funnily, Russian used to have its own acronym for computer — ЭВМ, literally "electronic calculating machine". My understanding is that it fell out of use when personal computers started getting imported into then-USSR sometime in the 80s.
In German, if you pronounce 'Hacker' the English way, you mean the computer kind. If you pronounce 'Hacker' the German way, you mean a guy who physically hacks with perhaps a hoe.
The mayor of a small German city near me (that’s home to three giant multinationals, two of which everyone in the world knows about) is “Dr. German Hacker.”
Different in Chinese, according to some clicking around translate.google.com. That seems to be one of the big hurdles for a lot of words that are otherwise very widespread.
French stop signs say "stop" of course, and stop is a pretty commonly used word in France for stop. In Quebec, they insist on putting "arrêt" on the signs because of their insecurity about English.
That would probably be the case for Indo-European languages, but it's way too easy to find counterexamples from outside of those languages. In Japanese it's "iie" (いいえ), in Finnish it's "ei", and the latter shares roots with other Uralic languages which probably have something similar.
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.
Even so, many of the languages have it similarly short, it either has n or o, or at least would rhyme in some way with no.
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.
Fair enough. I think loan words from a single source language are really the only ones that could potentially be found to be the same in all languages, though.
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.)
Officially, the Académie Française recommends the word for email be "mél" for message électronique (lit. Electronic message). In practice everybody says mail or email, but the official word is voluntarly chosen to not be the English word, as the Académie often does.
The French are still mad that their language is no longer the Lingua Franca and has been supplanted by English, so they (or at least the academic types) really hate English borrow-words. Most other languages don't have this inferiority complex.
Sugar has origins in ancient India where it was known as 'sharkara' in Sanskrit[1].
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'
In Hindi we only call the crystallized version chini possibly due to Chinese figuring out the crystallization process. The crude version is called Shakar in Hindi.
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)
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.
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.