101–110 of 511 posts
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 Russian there's no "dada", it's "papa" instead.
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."
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.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
tea - tea (different pronunciation) pineapple - ananász orange - narancs taxi - taxi (slightly different pronunciation) tomato - paradicsom
now let's look at the article's champions coffee - kávé chocolate - csokoládé
both the same origin, but distorted so much, that i could not order those things in starbucks...
so in my books, taxi is the winner
My two candidates are pepsi and amen. Coke is known as coca-cola where I live.
Amen is Hebrew?
"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
In Turkish, the word "ok" means "arrow". But people sometimes use "okay" in conversations as well.