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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?

#351

Post by denysvitali »

themoonisachees wrote: post #293
gscott wrote: post #286

The word Email is the same in every language.

Officially, the Académie Française recommends the word for email be "mél" for me ssage él ectronique (lit. Electronic message). In practice everybody says mail or email, but the official word is voluntarly chosen to not be the English word, as the Académie often does.

Yes, french is very weird when it comes to English terms - and especially IT related ones.

A computer is called "Ordinateur", Bytes are called "Octets" (and prefixed with the usual kO, MO, ... IIRC). Bits are surprisingly called Bits

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#352

Post by denysvitali »

hgraves1991 wrote: post #278

Brands and models tend to be unanimously identified: iPhone, Huawei, Mercedes, BMW, etc. Do these count as words, or names?

I think names. But they're not part of the language per se.

One funny thing is that some brands (like McDonald's) are actually translated / changed in some countries or languages

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#353

Post by est »

> Exceptions: Mandarin Chinese uses a different word for pineapple.

Actually two words for pineapple: 凤梨 & 菠萝

On the topic, I think one word is defintely the same in all languages: "OK". Yeah, even in Mandarin.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#354

Post by poizan42 »

OJFord wrote: post #168
poizan42 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not Japanese. They got the word from Portuguese missionaries though.

So.. no but actually yes?

I mean, Japanese isn't a Romance (i.e. Latin-derived) language, but the word "pan" is a loan word from one.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#355

Post by midoridensha »

gerdesj wrote: post #139
mminer237 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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…

>"Stealing words" That's a bit harsh. We borrow words (or loan them). We certainly don't steal them

Exactly: you can't "steal" a word, because when Language B borrows a word from Language A, Language A still has that word.

It's just like copying digital data: if I download a copy of Movie A, the studio hasn't lost a copy of it, so it's not "stolen".

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#356

Post by wodenokoto »

godelski wrote: post #151

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…

Japanese has a lot of words for mother and unlike in English with mom, mommy and mother, they aren’t related.

The most common are okaasan (with a few variations of its own), haha and mama.

But mama is written with katakana suggesting it is a loan word. Which I find interesting in terms of the babble word theory.

It could also be katakana because it is considered derived from a sound like how onomatopoeia are often written in katakana, which would really support the babble theory.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#358

Post by midoridensha »

poizan42 wrote: post #354
OJFord wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So.. no but actually yes?

I mean, Japanese isn't a Romance (i.e. Latin-derived) language, but the word "pan" is a loan word from one.

The interesting thing about Japanese is that, unlike most other languages, it writes loanwords differently than native words: they're written in the katakana character set rather than kanji (Chinese characters) or hiragana. So "pan" is one of these, since it was borrowed from Portuguese.

This rule isn't absolute, though: coffee has a (rarely-used) kanji version, and tobacco ("tabako") is written in hiragana, as is tempura. Sometimes if the word is old enough, it gets treated as a native word.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#359

Post by b3orn »

godelski wrote: post #327
romusha wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Georgians have been gender-unassuming since ancient time

Fun fact, there is a thing called a "noun class" which some people use synonymously with "grammatical gender"[0]. (not all noun classes are gendered) Personally I always liked the former term better because really just from a statistical point of view it doesn't make sense to me to call the "gender" conjugations gender based. There's far more inanimate objects that have a g̶e̶n̶d̶e̶r̶ categorical class than there are…

Gender comes from french genre, latin genus, same origin as generic and and means class/kind/sort it just shifted in meaning and now doesn't fit that well anymore.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#360

Post by teleforce »

This is a very popular modern riddle/joke, "The most understood word in the world is Coke (Coca-Cola), what is the second most popular word?", and the correct answer is "OK".

I once asked this question to a friend, and after a while he said "OK, I give up", without realizing that he had just answered the riddle.

Joking aside, I think beer is a very universal word. It's probably come from the Proto-Indo-European origin, meaning meaning "brewer's yeast".

[1] Beer In Other Languages:

https://brookstonbeerbulletin.com/beer-in-other-languages/

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