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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?

#261

Post by [deleted] »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #246
gerdesj wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Stealing words" That's a bit harsh. We borrow words (or loan them). We certainly don't steal them - you are welcome to take them back at any time. My favourite borrow word conundrum is "biftek". That is a loan word from French by quite a few languages (not English) - bifteck. Now, bifteck is derived from "beef steak" (English) English is a bit odd due to having several different words for an animal and its flesh via…

> English is a bit odd due to having several different words for an animal and its flesh How odd is this? I noticed something odd in Mandarin: cow: niu 牛 beef: niu rou 牛肉 sheep: yang 羊 mutton: yang rou 羊肉 pig: zhu 猪 pork: rou 肉 [it's possible to specify 猪肉, but not necessary] deer: lu 鹿 venison: lu rou 鹿肉 And some where the distinction doesn't exist in English: chicken (animal): ji 鸡 chicken (food): ji rou 鸡肉 [Englis…

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Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#262

Post by thaumasiotes »

eru wrote: post #225
philipov wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> [...] would have to conform to the phonemic structure of a language [...] I don't think that's a good criterion, because it would exclude a lot of loanwords.

It won't exclude anything. Loanwords can only be expressed in the phonemic structure of the language, because the speaker isn't capable of doing anything else.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#263

Post by eru »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #262
eru wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] would have to conform to the phonemic structure of a language [...] I don't think that's a good criterion, because it would exclude a lot of loanwords.

It won't exclude anything. Loanwords can only be expressed in the phonemic structure of the language, because the speaker isn't capable of doing anything else.

> [...], because the speaker isn't capable of doing anything else.

Huh? Japanese people have the same vocal tracts as Germans who have the same vocal tracts as Egyptians. Just because someone's native languages don't have a particular sound or sound combination doesn't mean they can't learn.

That's especially true for sound combinations: a Turkish speaker might find a word that doesn't follow Turkish vowel harmony a bit weird, but would have no trouble pronouncing it even without any training.

And even if a particular speaker can't produce a certain word, they can still recognise it as a word when someone else uses it in the context of their language.

As an example, most English speakers I know can't pronounce 'kn' like in Germany 'Knie' or 'Knecht'. But I can say "Knie is German for knee." and that is a sentence of five words. Or "The Knesset is the unicameral legislature of Israel."

(Just to be clear, English has words like knee or knight that are spelled with kn, but the k is silent. If you ask English speaker to pronounce "Knie" the German way, they tend to introduce something like a Schwa between the k and the n sounds.)

See https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/151054/why-is-the-k-...

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#264

Post by Condition1952 »

You need to be a little bit more lenient when comparing different languages. As far as I know, “cat” shared the same build pattern in many languages: guttural-a-dental

Cat - gato - katze - qOt

This, like the case of shai/tea implies that the animal expanded rather late and quickly from the same region (Asia?)

Mobile phone, giraffe, etc. sound and are written also similar in all Arabic and Latin scripts.

You can download the translations from the HTML source of any Wikipedia article and put them on a spreadsheet, if that’s what you’re into

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#266

Post by Delk »

coding123 wrote: post #251

I'm guessing the closest is "no"

That would probably be the case for Indo-European languages, but it's way too easy to find counterexamples from outside of those languages. In Japanese it's "iie" (いいえ), in Finnish it's "ei", and the latter shares roots with other Uralic languages which probably have something similar.

I wouldn't be surprised if a whole bunch of African or Native American languages happened to have entirely unrelated words for "no", although I don't speak those.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#270

Post by coding123 »

Delk wrote: post #266
coding123 wrote: post #251

I'm guessing the closest is "no"

That would probably be the case for Indo-European languages, but it's way too easy to find counterexamples from outside of those languages. In Japanese it's "iie" (いいえ), in Finnish it's "ei", and the latter shares roots with other Uralic languages which probably have something similar. I wouldn't be surprised if a whole bunch of African or Native American languages happened to have entirely unrelated words for "no",…

Even so, many of the languages have it similarly short, it either has n or o, or at least would rhyme in some way with no.

Of course there are exceptions, but all the examples in this article are dumb because they're just mostly modern words where the english version of it just gets copied. I guess I'm just more interested in the old stuff.

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