I'm guessing the closest is "no"
Are any words the same in all languages?
251–260 of 511 posts
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#252Mama and Papa are virtually the same in every language that I've been exposed to. My theory is that "babies first words" aren't actually words; "ma" and "pa" are just the easiest syllables for a baby to make and society has interpreted them as meaning mother and father.
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think new words is the right approach in general, but golem.
"Sushi" and "jazz" seem to be good candidates too. Chinese often seems to be the language that adopts very different terms even for quite culturally specific terminology (e.g. I'd tried niqab/burqa plus a bunch of less common musical instruments or styles from other cultures and they all seemed to have their own word in Mandarin. But the word for "jazz" superficially sounds similar at least).
One strike against "jazz" - in Irish it's "snagcheol" - no idea how it's pronounced but it's definitely etymologically unrelated.
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#254These 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…
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…
Computer in Chinese is 电脑 (dian nao) literally "electric brain".
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Turkish, the word "ok" means "arrow". But people sometimes use "okay" in conversations as well.
Luckily arrow in Turkish rhymes with 'woke' so the two are not easily confused. The most common Turkish word for okay is also a loanword from Arabic.
Tamam?
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#256Any 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.
> Well other than Chinese and Arabic (which also use very different words for "taxi"
的士, "taxi", Cantonese dik-si, a transparent loan from English.
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're familiar with ancient and medieval European history, you're pretty much familiar with the origins of most of the European languages. Areas that were part of the Roman Empire generally speak Latin dialects like Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese. The exception being the eastern part of the Roman Empire which historically spoke Greek and still speaks Greek (except for the parts of the Roman Empire that r…
> The exception being the eastern part of the Roman Empire which historically spoke Greek and still speaks Greek (except for the parts of the Roman Empire that remain Islamic). Aren't there big chunks of the Eastern Roman Empire that now speak Slavic languages? Also, the parts of the Eastern Roman Empire that currently remain Islamic constitute nearly the entire Eastern Roman Empire, including the capital.
I'm much less familiar with Eastern European history but that appears to be due to another wave of migration in early medieval Europe where Slavic peoples who originally lived further east moved into those areas after the Huns drove the Germanic tribes westward.[0]
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Georgian “mama” means father
and "uncle" in hindi (mother's brother, specifically; hindi has different words for various kinds of uncle/aunt/grandparent depending on the path through the family tree)
I’ve never really thought about it, but that most sounds simpler than all the step/in-law/twice removed nonsense in English.
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#259Mama and Papa are virtually the same in every language that I've been exposed to. My theory is that "babies first words" aren't actually words; "ma" and "pa" are just the easiest syllables for a baby to make and society has interpreted them as meaning mother and father.
Do you propose an explanation for why they are always this way round? Eg. you may expect some language to use 'mama' for father and 'papa' for mother based on your reasoning.
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#260Surprised it didn't mention the word or rather not word, "uhhh" or "umm" when we don't know what to say and need to fill silence. I know other languages and cultures have slight variations but the ending sound as far as I have seen is the same.
I don't think that's a word. It's an utterance, but not a lexical one. It's not onomatopoeia, either: 'bark' is onomatopoeia, but actually barking isn't.
But it is a lexical utterance. The form of the filler is specific to the language you're speaking. I'm having a really hard time trying to imagine what about it you think isn't lexicalized.