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Are any words the same in all languages?

blog.duolingo.com

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Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#23

Post by vidarh »

pieterr wrote: post #21

What about "Opera"? It's the first word that I use in 4 different language "wordle" games.

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.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#24

Post by vidarh »

jangliss wrote: post #8

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.

Apartheid translates to entirely different words in a number of languages it seems.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#25

Post by sambapa »

legohead wrote: post #2

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..

Nope, see finnish for supereasy counterexample

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#27

Post by LorenPechtel »

rvieira wrote: post #9

Cats "meow" (miˈaʊ̯) in all languages. Dogs can woof, blaf, ham, ao, ...

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.)

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#29

Post by kepler471 »

vidarh wrote: post #19
kepler471 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even within Europe there are many different words used for water, very cool! This is not a comprehensive list: Germanic - wasser/water/voda/woda French - eau Italian/Spanish - aqua/agua Greek - nero (νερό) Danish - vand Romanian - apă Latvian - udens Turkish - su Welsh - dwr

The Danish belongs in the "Germanic" list; as does the Norwegian "vann" and "vatn" (the latter also Faroese, Icelandic, Norn), and Swedish "vatten". The Romanian and French both comes from the latin aqua, just like the Italian/Spanish.

Thanks for this!

Looking into it a bit more, the French is also from the latin source (aqua) - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eau

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