491–500 of 511 posts
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Even within Europe there are many different words used for water, very cool! This is not a comprehensive list: Germanic - wasser/water/voda/woda French - eau Italian/Spanish - aqua/agua Greek - nero (νερό) Danish - vand Romanian - apă Latvian - udens Turkish - su Welsh - dwr
It is strange to see Slavic lumped in with Germanic. Is this common practice?
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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".
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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…
By the way, it's worth observing that that is a requirement of the kana writing system, but it's not a requirement of the language. [It also isn't a requirement of the kanji writing system, in which a symbol can indicate any arbitrary sequence of sounds, but that system is difficult to use for purposes of indicating pronunciation.] There are circumstances in which high vowels are entirely deleted, the most prominent example being the ordinary pronunciation of です /desɯ/ with no final vowel at all.
The fact that "fight" gets borrowed as "faito" also looks like an artifact of the spelling system - /o/ is not a high vowel and can't be deleted, but in native Japanese there is no tu syllable - that space in the syllabary is occupied by the affricated tsu, so loanwords that originally ended in /t/ or /d/ are given the final vowel /o/ instead. Illiterate Japanese might or might not interpret the English sound of "fight" the same way.
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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...
Harold was a Saxon king and I think you got former and latter reversed. 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…
Harold Godwinson was a saxon. He's talking about Harald Hadrada, a viking who invaded the North of England just before William The Bastard invaded from the South.
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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”)."
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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.
The mayor of a small German city near me (that’s home to three giant multinationals, two of which everyone in the world knows about) is “Dr. German Hacker.” He was a high school physics teacher.
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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…
I'm not sure what you think you're arguing. All loanwords in every language are pronounced using the phonemic structure of the borrowing language, the one that is being used, because that is the only possibility. The fact that someone is theoretically capable, after years of study, of learning to pronounce a foreign word, is not relevant in any way.
That's not true at all. Have a look at eg how Turkish borrows from English.
Turkish borrows eg the word 'computer' wholesale without modification. Despite that word violating Turkish vowel harmony. (Unless you want to tell me that vowel harmony is not part of Turkish 'phonemic structure'?)
Similarly lots of German borrowings from English in recent decades don't adjust to German 'phonemic structure'. Eg German typically pronounces st at the beginning of a word like sht, but that only happens in the borrowing 'Stress' for some speakers. (See the IPA on https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Stress for evidence.)
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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'.
Looks like they semi-artificially replaced a loanword with a crafted name than the same thing existed.
When 19th century Germans talked about railways, they mostly used English loanwords. But gradually most of those have been replaced with more 'native' creations.
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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.
Yes. But if you put an authentic Korean gimbap in front of your average English speaker, they'll call it Sushi.
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Kindergarten to Americans: when most children start elementary school, usually age 5 (maybe 6 if their parents didn’t think they were quite ready), Grade 0. What Germans would call “Vorschuljahr” (last year of Kindergarten, where there’s less play and more learning how to count, recognize letters, and sit still at a table) Kindergarten to Germans: usually its own establishment, available but not mandatory from age 3,…
The Kindergarten to Germans you're describing seems like the "Kita": https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindertagesst%C3%A4tte - but the whole education system is very confusing and it's generally not language-specific but more culturally specific AFAIK
Btw, Singaporean English uses Kindergarten in yet another subtle different meaning. They distinguish day care and Kindergarten.