311–320 of 511 posts
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and "uncle" in hindi (mother's brother, specifically; hindi has different words for various kinds of uncle/aunt/grandparent depending on the path through the family tree)
I’ve never really thought about it, but that most sounds simpler than all the step/in-law/twice removed nonsense in English.
Every language that has separate terms for relatives is an impenetrable mess.
There is one word which I think is the same in all languages: Tariff. And it makes sense - it's the "how much?" that would be (and is) asked at any port and travelling hub.
There's taryfa but it's mostly used as a slang word for taxi or any kind of constant payment for a service with slightly mocking tone.
There's also taryfikator which is the word for the list of fines for speeding tickets depending on the speed :)
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what? linguists would universally consider d and p extremely similar, they're near identical plosives
Plosives are a big category. "k" is also a plosive, but does not sound anything like a or . d and p are plosives but are made using completely different parts of the mouth (dental vs labial). Perhaps some linguist will consider them "close" but "near identical" is almost certainly wrong, but I am happy to be proven wrong with a citation.
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Robot intuitively sounds like it could be a good candidate. I don't think "computer" is quite that universal, though. AFAIK it's something else at least in French ("ordinateur"), Swedish ("dator"), Norwegian ("datamaskin"), Finnish ("tietokone"; lit. "knowledge/data machine") and Estonian ("arvuti"). I think Chinese has its own unrelated word, too. And about half of the African languages that I can easily check in Wi…
Computer in Chinese is 电脑 (dian nao) literally "electric brain".
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How is kaput universal? That's just a German word that some people might know, but most won't.
It's at least as commonly used in English as say Yiddish words like klutz and schmuck.
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…
Polish has mama and tata. Papa is only a loanword and less often used than papa as goodbye.
Coffee fails the test in my locale which is interestingly the supposed origin[0] of the drink/plant. We call it Buna in Ethiopia and it's a big symbol/part of the national identity not to mention the most important export commodity. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coffee
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what? linguists would universally consider d and p extremely similar, they're near identical plosives
Plosives are a big category. "k" is also a plosive, but does not sound anything like a or . d and p are plosives but are made using completely different parts of the mouth (dental vs labial). Perhaps some linguist will consider them "close" but "near identical" is almost certainly wrong, but I am happy to be proven wrong with a citation.
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…
Also computer is tietokone, information machine