Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Are any words the same in all languages?

blog.duolingo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 511 posts

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#481

Post by adrian_b »

b3orn wrote: post #359
godelski wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact, there is a thing called a "noun class" which some people use synonymously with "grammatical gender"[0]. (not all noun classes are gendered) Personally I always liked the former term better because really just from a statistical point of view it doesn't make sense to me to call the "gender" conjugations gender based. There's far more inanimate objects that have a g̶e̶n̶d̶e̶r̶ categorical class than there are…

Gender comes from french genre, latin genus, same origin as generic and and means class/kind/sort it just shifted in meaning and now doesn't fit that well anymore.

Greek genos, Latin genus and English kind are cognate words, deriving from the same Indo-European root.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#482

Post by pkd »

bedobi wrote: post #464
pkd wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plosives are a big category. "k" is also a plosive, but does not sound anything like a or . d and p are plosives but are made using completely different parts of the mouth (dental vs labial). Perhaps some linguist will consider them "close" but "near identical" is almost certainly wrong, but I am happy to be proven wrong with a citation.

both you and the comment I'm replying to are hilariously hackernews pedantic consider all the sounds humans can produce now ask yourself 1) amongst them, if p and d are close (there is no world in which the answer to that is "no") 2) if there are real life examples of languages shifting between them or using them interchangeably (there are, papa and dada being a prime example)

Of course, I did qualify my initial comment with "linguistically", the intention was to be pedantic.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#483

Post by helmchenlord »

pyinstallwoes wrote: post #409
foobiekr wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robot isn't even an old word - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R .

“In Czech, robota means forced labour of the kind that serfs had to perform on their masters' lands and is derived from rab, meaning "slave".”

This is an incorrect interpretation by people who want to see Karel Čapek's play "R.U.R."(Rossum's Universal Robots), which famously introduced the word "robot" into the English language, this way. While the root "robot" in Slavic languages goes back to "rab" for slaves, Robotnik (Russian/Polish), Robota (Czech) etc. has simply meant "worker" for ages, without any connotation to forced labour.

Fun fact: The word "slave" is derived from "Slavic people".

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#484

Post by kubanczyk »

godelski wrote: post #327
romusha wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Georgians have been gender-unassuming since ancient time

Fun fact, there is a thing called a "noun class" which some people use synonymously with "grammatical gender"[0]. (not all noun classes are gendered) Personally I always liked the former term better because really just from a statistical point of view it doesn't make sense to me to call the "gender" conjugations gender based. There's far more inanimate objects that have a g̶e̶n̶d̶e̶r̶ categorical class than there are…

I think that "noun class" muddles the picture.

Experience of learning some gendered languages makes it painfully obvious that it's a runaway effect, some kind of a mind virus. If 3 alcohols the wine, the champagne, and the sangria happen to use 3 distinct rules for declination in a language (and make you sound like a nitwit if you misremember one) something must have gone seriously awry. Partying hard cannot require such complexity.

If there would be some usefulness in that distinction, you might argue that it's as useful to assign woman together with one of the alcohols, man with a different one, and a child with the remaining one. To me it looks like standing the issue on its head.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#486

Post by nojvek »

occamschainsaw wrote: post #424
nojvek wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hindi/Gujarati/Sanskrit has mata and pita.

And mummy/pappa would be used be used colloquially in Gujarati, apart from the more formal mata/pita and other terms like ma/bapu.

Correct.

I believe forms of “ma” and “pa”/“ba” are almost universal for mother and father.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#488

Post by anticensor »

denysvitali wrote: post #351
themoonisachees wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would have expected "binaire" (short form of "numero binaire") instead of "bit".

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#489

Post by akkad33 »

grishka wrote: post #86
xnx wrote: post #10

"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

IMO it got popularized a lot by computers and other similar devices because it's so omnipresent in UIs.

Ok was popular way before computers became a thing, as I grew up in a small Asian village before either computers or cellphones were a thing. Maybe it's the other way around. Ok is so used in computers because it is familiar to everyone
Post reply on HN