471–480 of 511 posts
Alcohol Sugar Words of Arabic origin
Sugar has origins in ancient India where it was known as 'sharkara' in Sanskrit[1]. For reasons I haven't been able to figure out, some modern Indian languages (like Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi) call it 'cheeni' which is the same word to refer to someone as Chinese. Other languages use variations of the Sanskrit 'sakhar', 'sakkare' [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sugar
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…
But what does that even mean? "Computer" or "robot" are too modern?
Where do you draw the line? What about "piano" ? That one is centuries older and is similar in a shitload of languages. Some do use a variation of "clavier" (keyboard) for "piano" though.
Is "piano" native enough or is that thing already too modern?
How much does 'no' vary? Non, niet, nein... but I don't know much about non-European languages.
"Taxi" is universally understood, in my experience. (TFI calls it a "runner up" candidate.) "Kaput" is another.
In Persian, "Kaput" is the word for car hood.
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> Norse invasion in 1066 Is that a common way of describing the Norman invasion?
No. The Normans had been in Normandy for a long time and were quite distinct from the Norse. The Normans had been there for 150 years before they invaded South East England at pretty much the same time that Harald Hardrade was trying to invade the North East. The latter were Norse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_activity_in_the_British...
I very deliberately used the word Norse instead of Norman. 150 years is sod all time for "cultural" change, 1000 odd years ago. Nowadays we have all this jingoistic, nationalistic bollocks going on. The articles on HN reflect this:
"British scientists discover their own arses", "Russian scientists forget humanitarianism", "Chinese scientologists discover Pi three million years ago"
Norman is a modern word and so is norse here, and both are English terms and both mean northman - ie bloke (or bird - let's not be sexist) from the "north"
Bear in mind that travelling by boat is far easier than land, when the Fosse Way hasn't been built, let alone the A38 or M5.
If you want to get to grips with the olden times, you have to lose silly modern notions of well ... everything.
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It's at least as commonly used in English as say Yiddish words like klutz and schmuck.
You'll be surprised to know that English is.. Not a universal language.
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> [...], because the speaker isn't capable of doing anything else. Huh? Japanese people have the same vocal tracts as Germans who have the same vocal tracts as Egyptians. Just because someone's native languages don't have a particular sound or sound combination doesn't mean they can't learn. That's especially true for sound combinations: a Turkish speaker might find a word that doesn't follow Turkish vowel harmony a…
A Japanese speaker can learn to speak German, but that's not the same as a loan word. Japanese is a great example for how loan words are modified to conform to the phonemic structure of a language because it absorbed so much english in the past century. "Fight" is a word in english, but the loan word in japanese is pronounced "faito" because the language demands that all words end in either a vowel or syllabic 'N'. J…
It's also a source of consternation for people who consume Japanese media. There is a particularly funny example in the franchise Ah! My Goddess, in which the demon Maaraa (named after the Buddhist demon whose name in Sanskrit is Maara) gets "translated" into English as "Marller".
It's easy to see how a Japanese person went from the Japanese name to the English one - long Japanese vowels are taken as indicating English rhotic vowels, and then the fact that it would be strange for a rhotic vowel to be followed by an R hints that the Japanese R should be interpreted as an English L - but it's not exactly well-motivated by the actual name of the demon. (And while it might make sense to Japanese speakers attempting to make English out of Japanese, it makes much less sense to English speakers attempting to do the same thing - we hear "maaraa" as "mara" and view the Japanese derhotification of our rhotic vowels as a mistake, not an equivalence.)
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The English "nonsense" is a simple system that is easily understood. Every language that has separate terms for relatives is an impenetrable mess.
You're saying this like it's an objective fact...?
Every relation had a different name, including if they are older or younger than you, and if they are male or female.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimbap is pretty close. An English speaker would likely use 'sushi' to things that Koreans would call 'Gimbap'.
In parts of the US with large korean communities, gimbap is its name, if only because the ingredient list is so different. Sushi, for the most part, is seafood raw, and gimbap often has heavily marinated beef or other non-fish meat.