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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?

#411

Post by sn41 »

divbzero wrote: post #326

Another commonality across many languages is naming days of the week after celestial bodies: Sunday Sun Sōlis Hēlíou 日曜日 Monday Moon Lūnae Selḗnēs 月曜日 Tuesday Mars Mārtis Áreōs 火曜日 Wednesday Mercury Mercuriī Hermoû 水曜日 Thursday Jupiter Iovis Diós 木曜日 Friday Venus Veneris Aphrodítēs 金曜日 Saturday Saturn Sāturnī Krónou 土曜日 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_days_of_the_week

I think of naming the days after planets (in more or less the same order) this system is due to a common source : Sumeria, and made popular by the Babylonians who used it for their astronomy and their astrology.

In fact, one could argue that in its place, naming after the days of a fortnight is more intuitive : since it coincides with the phases of the moon. Indeed, the Sanskrit way of naming days (not used popularly except in religious and astrological settings) uses a 15-day system, two in a month: The waxing phase is called the Shukla Paksha (the white part) and the waning phase is called the Krishna Paksha (the dark part):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_days_of_the_week

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paksha

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#412

Post by numpad0 »

eru wrote: post #208
jononomo wrote: post #203

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'.

Looks like they semi-artificially replaced a loanword with a crafted name than the same thing existed.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#413

Post by kawhah »

dman-os wrote: post #299

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

This sort of makes sense, almost everyone else in the world learnt of coffee directly or indirectly via Arab-speaking people and so use their name for it, but Ethopians had it first and so have their own word for it.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#414

Post by gilleain »

hef19898 wrote: post #397
gilleain wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”)."

Or simi for telephone. Another near universal word would be police, wouldn't it? Iceland of course is one of the exceptions! I found those fun facts about Icelandic very fascinating when I first visited decades ago as a teenager.

Is 'police' that universal? I know Irish have the Gardaí - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garda_S%C3%ADoch%C3%A1na.

Yes, Icelandic has 'Lögreglu' and Greece has Αστυνομία (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenic_Police) but indeed most places use some variant of 'police'.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#415

Post by rob74 »

trvz wrote: post #134
spamtarget wrote: post #106

hungarian chimes in, the words mentioned in the article in hungarian: tea - tea (different pronunciation) pineapple - ananász orange - narancs taxi - taxi (slightly different pronunciation) tomato - paradicsom now let's look at the article's champions coffee - kávé chocolate - csokoládé both the same origin, but distorted so much, that i could not order those things in starbucks... so in my books, taxi is the winner

"paradicsom" just goes to show that this article is confidently incorrect: > Exceptions: Italian uses pomodoro, and some other languages use a word similar to the Italian one. Mandarin Chinese is another exception! "paradicsom" is not similar to pomodoro, in either pronounciation or meaning. And if the author has made one so simple mistake, we have to assume there are many more with the more exotic languages.

Yeah, pomodoro means "golden apple", paradicsom/Paradeiser comes from "paradise" (looks like Hungarians really like tomatos!), so nothing in common except that they start with "P" and the countries they are used in are roughly in the same region. Also, in Romanian a tomato is simply a "roșie" ("red") - Romanians apparently like to name fruit by their color, eggplants are called "vinete" ("purples").

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#416

Post by OJFord »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #316
OJFord wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's at least as commonly used in English as say Yiddish words like klutz and schmuck.

My dictionary suggests that the noun 'Schmuck' in modern German comes from the Low German adjective 'smuk' meaning beautiful; I can't even find it in an exclusively Yiddish dictionary however.

Oh sorry, I thought they were, but regardless I think kaput is used (in English) at least as much. Br vs Am maybe.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#417

Post by yakubin »

fy20 wrote: post #345
yakubin wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where the “thea” part comes from Chinese. It would be bizarre for a beverage discovered in ancient China (and brought to Europe only a couple centuries ago) to be named in latin.

Herbal teas were common in Europe before camellia sinensis tea was imported, so I find it hard to believe the Latin origin is correct. In Lithuanian 'arbarta' colloquially refers to all types of hot water infused drinks, there isn't any distinction of what kind of leaf or fruit (e.g. raspberry or buckthorn tea) is used. On the other hand, the consensus in English is that where wasn't a word for this type of drink, yo…

> Herbal teas were common in Europe before camellia sinensis tea was imported

They weren’t called teas though. tê is the name in Hokkien and that’s where all the similar-sounding names for tea come from originally… in countries where tea was originally brought from China via sea. The Polish name herbata was coined in the XVIIth century specifically for camelia sinensis, but due to general ignorance about what it actually was beyond “an infusion from some weed with medical applications” the word lost precision.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#418

Post by misterben »

_moof wrote: post #384
Delk wrote: post #250

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…

In Icelandic "computer" is tölva, a portmanteau of the words for number and seeress.

And robot is vélmenni, machine man. Very resistant to loan words.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#420

Post by alophawen »

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…

IIRC family relations and counting is most shared across cultures. Also a few words related to farming.

For example "mouse" is the same in ancient Babylon, even with the double meaning of a lady's private parts.

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