371–380 of 511 posts
Even "hacker" isn't a bad candidate, though it does seem to be different in Arabic.
In German, if you pronounce 'Hacker' the English way, you mean the computer kind. If you pronounce 'Hacker' the German way, you mean a guy who physically hacks with perhaps a hoe.
He was a high school physics teacher.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Robot isn't even an old word - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R .
“Huh?” Is strong candidate, if you accept it is a word. Here is a fun talk in the subject https://youtu.be/rHHJ3hSppEA?feature=shared It seems the demands of asking for clarification in conversation shapes the word to be easy and fast to pronounce.
"OK is frequently used as a loanword in other languages. It has been described as the most frequently spoken or written word on the planet." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK
In Turkish, the word "ok" means "arrow". But people sometimes use "okay" in conversations as well.
I thought I learned at one point that “kaka” (poop) was one of the earliest proto-Indo-European words [0] and think it is present in many languages but “all” is a pretty high bar. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/8lefir/why_doe...
Orange is also fairly universal, something similar to naranja or portokáli. In English we say the word with a hard g but with a soft g as in German it sounds closer to naranja - oran-ja.
Fruit or colour? In Finland the fruit is appelsiini. Chinese apple...
I think “Sinaasappel” is still the more common name for the fruit in the Netherlands.
Tea in Korean is neither "tea" or "chai" after all. It is "cha". Very bad post.
From the article, two words which are common to all languages are - 1. Coffee 2. Chocolate
In Vietnamese, "sô cô la" is chocolate, and I think it's bit of a stretch to say those are the same. Coffee is cà phê, which is good. Tea is another that doesn't work in Vietnamese (trà), but taxi is great (xe tắc xi).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's because sushi doesn't exist in any other language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimbap is pretty close. An English speaker would likely use 'sushi' to things that Koreans would call 'Gimbap'.