TV? WiFi? Bus?
Televizor, WiFi, avtobus
Are any words the same in all languages?
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Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#92"Taxi" is universally understood, in my experience. (TFI calls it a "runner up" candidate.) "Kaput" is another.
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.
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#93Slightly 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.
It's universal! Radiolab has an episode on it [1]. We've been talking to babies the same way for thousands of years.
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#94If taxi is an option, why not laser or computer?
Computer in Chinese is 电脑, pronounced “dian nao”; it roughly means “electric brain”.
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#95My 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 Georgian's case, mom is deda and dad is mama
Reminds me of Hebrew where Who is he, He is she, and Me is who.
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#96"Taxi" is universally understood, in my experience. (TFI calls it a "runner up" candidate.) "Kaput" is another.
Taxi, bar, hotel, restaurant, are very common. Maybe because of tourism? I have no idea what “kaput” means…
"kaput"
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!
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#97A 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.
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.
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#98If taxi is an option, why not laser or computer?
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.
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#99"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
IMO it got popularized a lot by computers and other similar devices because it's so omnipresent in UIs.
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.
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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!