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Are any words the same in all languages?

blog.duolingo.com

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Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#141

Post by whitten »

wizofaus wrote: post #117
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

"Taxi" is quite different in Chinese and Arabic for a start. I'd guess it's likely to be almost universally understood among all humans that have had exposure to the concept though.

I think taxi (spelled differently) is in Russian, Greek, and Spanish

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#143

Post by aleph_minus_one »

narag wrote: post #122
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TV? WiFi? Bus? At least the first two words are different in German: - TV: [der] Fernseher - WiFi: WLAN (Wi-Fi is rather a trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance; in my observation spreading the usage of this trademark was mostly successful in the USA)

Bummer, I believed I could use ich glotz tv if someone asked me if I can speak some German. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWzPcDtZZZo

If you read the lyrics of this song

> https://genius.com/Nina-hagen-band-tv-glotzer-white-punks-on...

you realize that this song is about some lowly educated proll who watches TV all day. By deliberately using quite some colloquial and unsophisticated words and phrasings in the lyrics, the singer/songwriter sends a very clear message how much TV dulled this person's mind.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#145

Post by mostlylurks »

davidw wrote: post #125

How much does 'no' vary? Non, niet, nein... but I don't know much about non-European languages.

>no [...] Non, niet, nein

These are all from the same language family (the indo-european language family), so it's no wonder that there are still noticeable similarities in a word this fundamental even after thousands of years of divergence.

>non-European languages

"European" languages isn't a particularly good category, since europe has a wide range of languages that don't belong to the indo-european language family, such as basque and the uralic languages, of which there are too many to list in europe, but some notable ones include hungarian, finnish, and estonian.

For reference, the word for "no" in finnish is completely different: "ei", but it conjugates similarly to a verb, so it's "en/et/ei/emme/ette/eivät" depending on the person and number. In the very closely related estonian language this system has already eroded away and left only "ei", and in colloquial finnish a similar process is already underway and the "emme/eivät" forms have already disappeared.

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#146

Post by mostlylurks »

ralfd wrote: post #123
wizofaus wrote: post #114

Any languages that use a distinctively different word for "robot"? Well other than Chinese and Arabic (which also use very different words for "taxi" than most other widely spoken languages). Btw my other candidate is "chihuahua" (though there's probably other dog breeds...). And yes it's the essentially the same in Chinese and Arabic if Google translate is to be believed.

Mandarin and Cantonese: Jīqìrén https://translate.google.de/?sl=de&tl=zh-CN&text=robot Meaning: http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/words/22467/

Do they still call it Jīqì"rén" if it's not human-like? Like a vacuuming robot or a robotic arm at an assembly line?

Re: Are any words the same in all languages?

#147

Post by Tijdreiziger »

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

If said Starbucks is in Germany, you might well be able to order some Kaffee and Schokolade, though!
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