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..
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.
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)
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
"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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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].
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
“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.
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!
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.
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"
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...
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.
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.)
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.)
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.
> 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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadQuite confusing, but it seems to work?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadda
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.
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.
The 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
https://www.etymonline.com/word/amen
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.
[1]: https://uesz.nytud.hu/index.html?uuid=a95e306a-7590-1014-865...
"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:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22190802
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.
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.
Kawa is borrowed from Ottoman Turkish kahve just like most of the other European words for coffee.
It's the first word that I use in 4 different language "wordle" games.
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.
1. Coffee
2. Chocolate
"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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EWMlCusxjQ
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.
[1] https://radiolab.org/podcast/91514-sound-as-touch