121–130 of 511 posts
What about stop? It had likely spread to most latin-type countries due to traffic signs.
TV? WiFi? Bus?
> TV? WiFi? Bus? 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)
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.
https://translate.google.de/?sl=de&tl=zh-CN&text=robot
Meaning:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't it simply an English "word" which is very popular?
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.
"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_.
hungarian chimes in, the words mentioned in the article in hungarian: 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
"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.
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.
It's universal! Radiolab has an episode on it [1]. We've been talking to babies the same way for thousands of years. [1] https://radiolab.org/podcast/91514-sound-as-touch
How much does 'no' vary? Non, niet, nein... but I don't know much about non-European languages.