391–400 of 511 posts
A Dutch friend once said that the one word from his language that has had universal reach was "apartheid"... I'm sure that if there are any truly global words they are probably ones like that (initially) attached to a specific geographical context.
There is another Dutch word that must be pretty widespread in STEM circles: ‘eigenvector’.
https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saj%C3%A1tvektor_%C3%A9s_saj%C...
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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…
In Icelandic "computer" is tölva, a portmanteau of the words for number and seeress.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/t%C3%B6lva
"A portmanteau word, coined by Sigurður Nordal in 1965 from tala (“number”) + völva (“prophetess”)."
"Mafia" is an italian word understood by everybody on earth.
Surprised bread wasn't mentioned, seems like there are more than a few languages where the word for bread is 'pan'
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"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…
> Norse invasion in 1066 Is that a common way of describing the Norman invasion?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_activity_in_the_British...
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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.
Japanese used to do this thing too -- back then Kanji was still the proper scholarly thing to use and scholars were the main contact to Western knowledge. In fact, a good number of Chinese words for Western concepts came from Japanese translations. 社会 society, 经济学 economy, 自由 liberty all came from Japanese translations. https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/漢語中的日語借詞
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In Icelandic "computer" is tölva, a portmanteau of the words for number and seeress.
That's amazing : https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/t%C3%B6lva "A portmanteau word, coined by Sigurður Nordal in 1965 from tala (“number”) + völva (“prophetess”)."
I found those fun facts about Icelandic very fascinating when I first visited decades ago as a teenager.
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…
> How about "mama" and "papa"? And then finnish is (of course) quite different. Mom = äiti, Dad = isä
I must admit I've always meant to look at the differences, and see where they come from, but I've never quite remembered.
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Luckily arrow in Turkish rhymes with 'woke' so the two are not easily confused. The most common Turkish word for okay is also a loanword from Arabic.
Tamam?
Turkey also borrowed the "qahwa" (meaning coffee) from Arabic but since there's no "w" in Turkish, it became "kaveh".
Later the word "coffee" spread to European through Turkey to Dutch, then English and the rest of the world now use the word coffee [1]. The strange thing is that now even in Arab world like Saudi, most of the young people use the word "coffee" rather than original "qahwa". This is one of the rare situations where the original loaner now become the borrower. The only saving grace is that the best coffee type is still Arabica.
It's also very interesting to note that the popular and universal English word "cafe" as in cafeteria also derived from the Arabic word "qahwa", perhaps from the summary of the word for coffee house [2].
[1] From Qahwa to Coffee:
https://arabiconline.eu/arabic-coffee-qahwa/
[2] Coffee and qahwa: How a drink for Arab mystics went global:
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…
Hindi/Gujarati/Sanskrit has mata and pita.
But the commoner words for parents in Malayalam is "amma" and "appa/acha".