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Are any words the same in all languages?

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Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#151

Post by godelski »

These seem like very bad candidates. All are loan words, which is interesting, but we could go deeper if we're considering pineapple/ananas and coffee. And let's be real, words like robot and computer are mostly the same in this respect too, especially if we're considering taxi. But what about words that are more "native"?

How about "mama" and "papa"? There are variations, but these seem to be pretty small and mostly replacing the plosive in papa with a b or t. You can pretty much go down the google translate list and see. For mama sometimes the last a changes to an i. Here's some examples (not a linguist or many language speaker so please correct me if I'm wrong. Trying to add some sounding help)

Nearly identical in: Afrikaans, English, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Hungarian, Japanese, Filipino

Albanian: mama, babi

Arabic, Chinese: mama (妈妈/媽媽), baba (爸爸)

Bulgarian: mama, tatko (татко)

Chez: mama, tatínek

Hebrew "i-ma" (אִמָא), "ah-bah" ̶"̶b̶a̶h̶-̶b̶a̶h̶"̶ (אַבָּא) (edited: thanks zimzam and ars!)

Korean: "Oh-mah" (엄마) "Ah-pa" (아빠)

My understanding is that these are pretty early words and need to be pronounceable by infants. I wonder what the first human words were and if we still use any of them. We have some constellation myths that are probably older than written language (not recorded, so can never confirm). The 7 sisters is a good example, but remember these are all always contested. We'll never really know tbh.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#153

Post by Tijdreiziger »

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.

There is another Dutch word that must be pretty widespread in STEM circles: ‘eigenvector’.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#154

Post by crdrost »

asyx wrote: post #69
twosdai wrote: post #53

Surprised it didn't mention the word or rather not word, "uhhh" or "umm" when we don't know what to say and need to fill silence. I know other languages and cultures have slight variations but the ending sound as far as I have seen is the same.

Fillers are cultural. Japanese speakers use ano.

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.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#155

Post by irrational »

mcswell wrote: post #113
rvieira wrote: post #9

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

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 indige…

But, meow isn’t the word for cat, it’s the word for the sound a cat makes.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#157

Post by narag »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #143
narag wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bummer, I believed I could use ich glotz tv if someone asked me if I can speak some German. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWzPcDtZZZo

If you read the lyrics of this song > https://genius.com/Nina-hagen-band-tv-glotzer-white-punks-on... you realize that this song is about some lowly educated proll who watches TV all day. By deliberately using quite some colloquial and unsophisticated words and phrasings in the lyrics, the singer/songwriter sends a very clear message how much TV dulled this person's mind.

Thank you! no way that I could know that words and phrasings were intentionally dumb from the translation, though the meaning I knew.

I'll better look for a different nonsensical bit taken from another song :)

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#158

Post by mostlylurks »

magicpin wrote: post #54
sambapa wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, see finnish for supereasy counterexample

And yet the word for grandma is suspiciously similar to mama.

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.
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