361–370 of 511 posts
Cats "meow" (miˈaʊ̯) in all languages. Dogs can woof, blaf, ham, ao, ...
Japanese uses “nyaa” for meow. I’m sure there are other counterexamples.
[1]: https://uesz.nytud.hu/index.html?uuid=a95e306a-7590-1014-865...
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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 featu…
> 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. I'm not sure we can conclude that? Borrowings can displace existing words, so the current state of the vocabulary doesn't necessarily tell you what was there before. As a slightly related example in German: 'Base' and 'Vetter' for your girl and boy cousins…
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Computer in Chinese is 电脑 (dian nao) literally "electric brain".
And robot is 機器人, literally machine man. Mandarin is weird about loan words. Where the Japanese will gobble up any word and incorporate it into “Japanese,” Chinese goes through some complicated hoops to come up with a word etymologically rooted in Chinese. However, in practice everyone I know says “email” instead of 電子郵件.
So here's an interesting point: etymologically, Chinese is the only evolving language other than English.
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> 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…
I think you failed to realize that 肉 just means "meat", in the most general sense possible. Under no circumstance is the character by itself ever directly denotes pork. So there's really nothing odd about saying "chicken meat" or "cow meat" when you want to specifically specify the flesh of the animal for consumption.
Yes, I'm aware of that. (It isn't restricted to meat; it will also, much like the English word "flesh", refer to the flesh of fruit.)
> Under no circumstance is the character by itself ever directly denotes pork.
But this is just false. The character by itself directly denotes pork. It's not an unusual use.
The constructions with 肉 are not being given as examples of using a different word for the animal and the food. They all use the same word.
The example was the one at the end of the list, 水母 vs 海蜇.
"Mafia" is an italian word understood by everybody on earth.
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> Whereas "sushi" I haven't found a language using a distinct word for so far. Actually, there is: Japanese (and Korean)! The English word 'sushi' can be translated into Japanese as 'sushi' or 'sashimi' or even 'gimbap'. (Careful English speakers also use the borrowings 'sashimi' and 'gimbap' etc, but casual English speakers will refer to all of these and more as just 'sushi'.) Similar to how Kindergarten means diffe…
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/german-english/k... Am I missing something?
Kindergarten to Germans: usually its own establishment, available but not mandatory from age 3, usually has fees in the 200 EUR/mo range for all day with hot lunch (with further subsidies for poorer families), rather like an American preschool for ages 3-5, with the 5-6 year (“Vorschuljahr”) being more like American kindergarten.
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…
So after "computer" war introduced to Turkey, for a while "komputer" word was used for it. But Around 1969 Aydın Köksal, an Electric and Electronic Professor from Hacettepe University who was also influenced this movement tried new Turkish words for computing related terms. And " Bilgisayar" was termed at this time. There are also other terms coined by him and his colleagues like "hardware-donanım", "software - yazilim (meaning something written)..
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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