You can have an entire conversation in Lao with one word: sabaidee
1: sabaidee (hello)
2: sabaidee (hello)
1: sabaidee bo (how are you) (bo is a question mark replacement as Lao is a tonal language)
2: sabaidee (okay)
2: sabaidee bo (how are you)
1: sabaidee (okay)
2: sabaidee (bye)
1: sabaidee (bye)
Similar to the grammatically correct English sentence [“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo)
It's correct in American English but as a British English speaker it made no sense to me. We don't use buffalo as a verb and buffalo the place isn't well known.
I'm from Buffalo, and the only buffalo are at the zoo. (There's actually no such thing as a "buffalo" native to the Americas, but there you go.) Here's a thorough explanation:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo\_buffalo\_Buffalo\_buffalo\_buffalo\_buffalo\_Buffalo\_buffalo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo)
The word for "work" or "job" in many Germanic languages (German *Arbeit,* Dutch, Afrikaans and Norwegian *arbeid,* Swedish *arbete,* Danish *arbejde,* Icelandic *arbeiði,* etc.) is cognate with the English word *orphan* and apparently derives from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning something like "orphan, slave".
Other members of the horrifying etymology team here are many many Slavic languages with words like *robić* (Polish) or *робо́та* (Ukrainian), along with Japanese and Korean via German loanword (**アルバイト** *arubaito* and **아르바이트** *areubaiteu* "part-time job").
I went down a rabbit hole here once and a *surprising amount* of words for work in various languages come from something like "pain, degradation, torture, slavery". Like, in addition to Arbeit and co. and munka, there's also:
\* Spanish *trabajar* and French *travailler* are apparently from Latin *tripalium,* a torture instrument
\* Lithuanian *strādāt* was apparently borrowed from Old Slavic *stradati,* meaning something like "to work hard, to suffer" and is cognate with Russian *страда́ть (stradat')* "to suffer"
\* Greek *δουλειά (douleiá)* comes from an old word meaning "slave"
\* and I swear there was also an Arabic one that derived from something meaning "degrading physical labour", but I can't find it now
The inescapable conclusion I draw is that work has always been hell, at least in large swathes of Europe and the Middle East. (I had a hard time finding etymologies for non-European languages.)
For an example of etymology going the other way, Swedish has the common adjective "jobbig(t)", which looks like it means *work-y* (well, I guess, "job-y") but means *bothersome, onerous, annoying.*
There’s a popular [theory](https://theweek.com/culture/language/1010499/the-trials-and-travails-of-travel#) that the French work travail (work) is derived from Latin tripalium (the name for a torture rack). It’s dubious, but the idea is entertaining.
It depends how you look at it. Without employment, most people would have to source their own food and shelter, which would mean hunting, scouting, and DIY, all of which constitute 'work.'
In German, "Gift" also means poison (and venom too). Originally the word referred to presents, just like in English. It was still used that way in Goethe's times, but the meaning "present" gradually shifted to "deadly present" or "poison".
Many people are familiar with inflected attributive articles from German and Dutch, and they learn early on that longer adjectives in Afrikaans, when attributive, usually also require an -e inflection. They may also learn that certain (usually monosyllabic) adjectives are not inflected. What only more advanced learners will know is that some attributive adjectives are inflected for a metaphorical meaning, but not for a more concrete meaning. Thus:
Die man is arm. - The man is poor.
Die arm man - The poor man (who is short of money).
Die arme man - The "poor" man (who may be rich but is unfortunate in some way).
Here's another one:
The word "**latte**", which English speakers use when referring to coffee with milk, actually means **milk** in Italian, so if you go to Italy and order "latte", you get milk. If you want coffee with milk, you should order a **cappuccino** instead!
It’s pretty cool seeing latin connections. In welsh milk is llaeth, which is much more similarly spelt to french lait, but it’s still quite cool to see even italian be pretty similar to welsh.
In my other native language besides Tagalog, Sambal, we use cardinal directions instead of left, right, front and back when describing the positions of objects.
Get that shovel to your south. (instead of to your right, for example)
Take my clothes in the closet east of my room.
We are going west. (instead of just pointing the direction, or naming the place)
I bought it from the store north of the bakery.
Our words for east and west kinda mean "high ground" and "low ground" respectively. A mountain range is always at the east of our province, so the mountain range acts like our reference point for knowing what direction to say. But you only do this, looking at the mountain, when you're new to a place. Once you're familiar with a place, you would have a general feeling of where the cardinal directions are, that you would know your cardinal directions even when inside of houses and buildings and other places where you can't see the mountain.
Our use of the cardinal directions is inexact however. For example, say, a store is actually northwest of the bakery, but the road in general is going north, then we would still use our word for north to describe the position of store relative to the bakery. And this is the case for everything. The east of your room may not be truly east, what you consider to be the "east" of your room depends on what cardinal directions you use to describe the directions of the road in front of your house.
In Spanish, 'esposa' means 'wife' and 'esposas' means 'handcuffs.' 😁
I almost fell off my chair when I found that out. I guess 'ball & chain' would've been a little too obvious. 😂
It is just a word that sounds funny to a foreigner but in Romanian we have the word ,,lalea" (tulip), tulips will be ,,lalele" and the tulips is going to be ,,lalelele". To add more "l" you could say ,,lalelele lor" - their tulips.
60% of the last names of Vietnam 🇻🇳 are Nguyen.
Chinese has Wang 王 （ King ） and Wong, but in Cantonese known as Ng and sounds like “mm”, I believe and means “ FIVE “ . Someone correct me if I am wrong, please.
Hungarians say : “ egész ségedre “ ( “ To all your health “ ) if someone sneezes , BUT if you say
“ egész segedre “, you are saying
“ all over your butt “ ! ( using the dirty a** word )
Tack så mycket. Jag gillar främmande språk, men det är mycket viktigt för mig att någon rättar mig.
( = “ Thanks so much. I like foreign languages, but it is very important to me that someone corrects me. “ )
I love foreign languages so much that I have lengthy conversations in Mandarin Chinese with natives from Taiwan 🇹🇼 , mainland China 🇨🇳 or Singapore 🇸🇬 , Spanish with natives from Hispanic countries ( for example, Mexico 🇲🇽 , Spain 🇪🇸, El Salvador 🇸🇻, Puerto Rico 🇵🇷 , South American countries, etc. ) , French with natives from France 🇫🇷 or French-speaking areas , German with natives from Germany 🇩🇪 , Swedish with natives from Sweden 🇸🇪, and attempt my Hungarian 🇭🇺 , Japanese 🇯🇵 , Dutch 🇳🇱 , Italian 🇮🇹 , Russian 🇷🇺 and Esperanto with natives from their respective countries .
Update :
Wow ! Did you see on r/Esperanto the BABY listening to and answering back in Esperanto when his/her father asked her/him where their body parts such as nose, eyes, mouth, stomach, and feet were ? The baby was repeating the body part in Esperanto while pointing to it !!!
Yes, there are. I met some. In France🇫🇷, I met a family who grew up speaking Esperanto and in Athens, Greece, at the Parthenon, a family from Albania 🇦🇱 was speaking it while seeing my green star ⭐️ Esperanto pin “clasped”onto my shirt or coat. I also heard it spoken on a bus in Amsterdam, stayed overnight with a lady in Athens who only knew Greek and Esperanto. I stayed overnight with the American president of an Esperanto organization in Rotterdam, Netherlands 🇳🇱 who spoke 100% Esperanto with his girlfriend and about 98% Esperanto with me, and met a bunch of Esperantists in Rome, Italy. They used to teach it in Iran 🇮🇷 and China 🇨🇳 and now they teach it in colleges in China 🇨🇳. Esperanto is NOT new. It was invented in 1887 and years ago, an almanac said there were 10 million speakers. It’s the easiest language I know with no exceptions that I know of except for song lyrics and poetry, I guess. There is even a subreddit called
r/Esperanto.
Super cool! I studied Esperanto years ago using DuoLingo back when it was way more user-friendly.
I totally joined the above mentioned subreddit. Thanks for pointing it out!
In Spanish, "las esposas" can mean either "wives" or "handcuffs."
English is one of only a few languages that have more non-native speakers than native speakers. Two other examples are French and Swahili.
The word for “seal “, the animal 🦭in French is
“phoque” that sounds SOOO close to the F word in English that it took another person on Reddit to use the IPA ( International Phonetic Alphabet ) to explain to me there was a SLIGHT difference in their pronunciations after I asked !!!
Брак (brak, pronounced as "bruck" or so) in Russian means both "marriage" and "defect" (as in defective, faulty items). So, naturally, there is a joke about "you wouldn't call a good thing 'marriage' ". It's a coincidence though, brak as marriage has Slavic origin (from a verb 'to take') and brak as a defect is borrowed from Germanic languages through Polish (the English verb 'to break' is its relative).
Use only one word in Malay language: sayang sayang, sayang sayang sayang? Sayang sayaaang sayang...
English translation: Dear dear, do you love me? I love you very dearly...
þorn (thorn) is an old english letter with a TH prononciation. When printing was popularized and exported to the english speaknig world, þorn wasn't available, so they typically used "y" which is why you sometimes see things as "Ye olde ..." the ye part would actually be pronounced the same way as "the."
**Mayday** that you hear pilots say when their plane is going down in movies means help me in French. We spell it the way it sounds but the French spelling is "M'aidez" and it's pronounced the same.
A fact even I wasn't aware of before starting taking with foreigners regularly is that, apparently, Brazilian Portuguese has too many synonyms/slangs for penis....!
I don't even speak any Portuguese but I know one Brazilian Portuguese slang word for penis, because I've read warnings about mispronouncing their word for bread.
'bom dia, quero uma pila tamanho grande, por favor?'
O dono da loja: 😏
A few of ours: pinto, pau, pica, piroca, caralho, cacete, Bráulio, jubileu, mandioca, espada, salame, salsicha, linguiça, rola, benga, bengala, banana, estrovenga, jeba, beringela, pingulin, vara, anaconda, mastro, bilau.
Those are the ones I remember now. There is more. Much more.
A few Polish words which sound a little naughty in English:
* fakt - fact; sounds like f***ed
* kant - 90 degree edge on an object or a straight edge crease in fabric; sounds like c**t
* bicz - whip; sounds like b*tch
* blady - pale; sounds like "bloody" which is slightly crass in some countries closely related to Britain
* sitko - sieve; sounds like "sh*t-co", we're reaching a little now 😅
And one in reverse, the light globe manufacturer "Osram" sounds in Polish like the word meaning "I will sh*t all over".
It isn't my language, but if you search any combination of two letters from the farsi-arabic script, it is bound to have at least one correct search result in Farsi. I have no idea why.
With the exception of dirty words of course.
Pet in English is an animal companion. Pet in valencian is a fart.
Fart in valencian means to be fed up.
There are also fartons which are delicious long pastries you dip in horchata
In Filipino (aka Tagalog), there are many variations of words with the same letters but once you change their vowel they mean something different every time. (Ex. Bola would mean ball, Bula would mean bubble, Bara would loosely translate to something like 'stuck' and Bira would mean 'to hit'.)
Not my language but my friends were chatting about this exact thing, one of them said how in mandarin, one of their filler words ("like," "um", "er") is na-ge. Depending on accent, very much sounds like nig-
It’s caused trouble: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/16/913693813/professor-is-at-center-of-controversy-over-chinese-word-that-sounded-like-racial I know a lot of native Chinese speakers who will pronounce it nei-ge while in China but in the US they pronounce it na-ge to avoid this very issue.
I really like that! 😂 I took a semester of Dutch, sort of by accident because I expected German to be listed under Deutsch and apparently don't know anything about reading or checking, but I always wish I had continued with the language.
In Hungarian, syntax can change the emphasis of a sentence, but not the denotative meaning. You can put the subject, direct object, and indirect objects in any order, and the sentence means the same thing. The words will change form to tell you their grammatical function.
on portuguese there are a lot of expressions using the word "cu" that means "ass"
cuzão: aumentative of "cu" and can be used to reffer of a person who's rude
cu na mão: "ass on the hand" .used when someone is/was scared of is/was in a situation of fear
meu cu: "my ass" used as negation (teu cu "your ass" also works)
nascer com o cu virado para a lua: "to be born with the ass towards the moon" someone who's lucky
até o cu fazer bico: "until the ass pouts" until the limit
cu do judas: "judas's ass" somewhere who's very far
The word for for “keys” in my TL is ключі, which, I don’t see it, but I’ve been told out of context it kinda sounds like the English word >! Coochie !<
It’s Sorcery and satanist groups often write in Hebrew aka my language to make the text look runic and mysterious, often times just making it complete gibberish and the letters are completely messed up, people really be thinking we write some dwarf text and shit.
Even the popular manga manhwa or manhua (idk the difference) solo levelling used hebrew and called it runic text or whatever.
In hindi, when talking about plural things in a dismissive tone, we use a rhyming slang
Eg-tea becomes chai-wai
Grass becomes ghaas-foos
The second terms dont mean anything, they are just variations in the first syllable of the first term, which is actually a word.
1. Listen to Russian translations of words book, fact and shield
2. If we can't answer directly, we just use all possible answers in one: "yes no maybe" (да нет наверное), which just means a very indecisive"no".
3. And with the words meaning "yes" (да) and kinda "well" (ну) as an interjection, can make answers yes and no, depending on their order.
Well yes - yes
Yes well - no
In Japanese, they don’t say “I love you” like we do in English, it they say ビープビープ音レタス which means “your eyes sparkle like the stars” and it’s kinda cute how poetic of a language it can be. 😏
You can have an entire conversation in Lao with one word: sabaidee 1: sabaidee (hello) 2: sabaidee (hello) 1: sabaidee bo (how are you) (bo is a question mark replacement as Lao is a tonal language) 2: sabaidee (okay) 2: sabaidee bo (how are you) 1: sabaidee (okay) 2: sabaidee (bye) 1: sabaidee (bye)
Sabaidee!!!
sabaidee
The same goes for french: "ça va?" - "ça va. ça va?" - "ça va." -> "How are you?" - "Okay. How are you?" - "Fine."
Similar to the grammatically correct English sentence [“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo)
This was a great read, thanks for sharing.
It's correct in American English but as a British English speaker it made no sense to me. We don't use buffalo as a verb and buffalo the place isn't well known.
American English speaker here and it does not make sense to me either lol.
You do need to read the explanation to successfully parse it, I think, even if you live on Lake Erie and know the verb "buffalo."
I'm from Buffalo, and the only buffalo are at the zoo. (There's actually no such thing as a "buffalo" native to the Americas, but there you go.) Here's a thorough explanation: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo\_buffalo\_Buffalo\_buffalo\_buffalo\_buffalo\_Buffalo\_buffalo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo)
Kinda reminds me of Mandarin, where asking "hello?" (你好吗) would be translated to "how are you". Interesting
The word for "work" or "job" in many Germanic languages (German *Arbeit,* Dutch, Afrikaans and Norwegian *arbeid,* Swedish *arbete,* Danish *arbejde,* Icelandic *arbeiði,* etc.) is cognate with the English word *orphan* and apparently derives from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning something like "orphan, slave". Other members of the horrifying etymology team here are many many Slavic languages with words like *robić* (Polish) or *робо́та* (Ukrainian), along with Japanese and Korean via German loanword (**アルバイト** *arubaito* and **아르바이트** *areubaiteu* "part-time job").
The Hungarian word for work (munka) comes from a Slavic word meaning 'pain'
I went down a rabbit hole here once and a *surprising amount* of words for work in various languages come from something like "pain, degradation, torture, slavery". Like, in addition to Arbeit and co. and munka, there's also: \* Spanish *trabajar* and French *travailler* are apparently from Latin *tripalium,* a torture instrument \* Lithuanian *strādāt* was apparently borrowed from Old Slavic *stradati,* meaning something like "to work hard, to suffer" and is cognate with Russian *страда́ть (stradat')* "to suffer" \* Greek *δουλειά (douleiá)* comes from an old word meaning "slave" \* and I swear there was also an Arabic one that derived from something meaning "degrading physical labour", but I can't find it now The inescapable conclusion I draw is that work has always been hell, at least in large swathes of Europe and the Middle East. (I had a hard time finding etymologies for non-European languages.)
For an example of etymology going the other way, Swedish has the common adjective "jobbig(t)", which looks like it means *work-y* (well, I guess, "job-y") but means *bothersome, onerous, annoying.*
There’s a popular [theory](https://theweek.com/culture/language/1010499/the-trials-and-travails-of-travel#) that the French work travail (work) is derived from Latin tripalium (the name for a torture rack). It’s dubious, but the idea is entertaining.
I've mainly seen that theory presented as solid fact! it actually being dubious is kind of reassuring. 😅
And this Slavic form gives us the modern English word "robot", via Czech, coming full circle in a sense.
I mean, work is slavery as far as I know...
It depends how you look at it. Without employment, most people would have to source their own food and shelter, which would mean hunting, scouting, and DIY, all of which constitute 'work.'
Otrok in Slovenian means a child. Otrok in Slovakian means a slave
Same in Malay and Indonesian. Budak in Malay means child, slave in Indonesian 👀
In Swedish, **gift** means both married and poison.
In German, "Gift" also means poison (and venom too). Originally the word referred to presents, just like in English. It was still used that way in Goethe's times, but the meaning "present" gradually shifted to "deadly present" or "poison".
I would like the "Mitgift," which we still know and understand as a word and concept without practising this tradition, though.
Also "fart" means "speed bump" in Swedish. 💨💨💨
You're thinking of "farthinder". "Fart" means "speed", and "Slutspurt med bra fart" means "Final sprint at a good pace".
I’m going to incorporate this into my everyday parlance… somehow……
Many people are familiar with inflected attributive articles from German and Dutch, and they learn early on that longer adjectives in Afrikaans, when attributive, usually also require an -e inflection. They may also learn that certain (usually monosyllabic) adjectives are not inflected. What only more advanced learners will know is that some attributive adjectives are inflected for a metaphorical meaning, but not for a more concrete meaning. Thus: Die man is arm. - The man is poor. Die arm man - The poor man (who is short of money). Die arme man - The "poor" man (who may be rich but is unfortunate in some way).
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Except they're not writing in German, they're writing in Afrikaans as they stated. And in Afrikaans it is, in fact, "die man."
My bad :(
Here's another one: The word "**latte**", which English speakers use when referring to coffee with milk, actually means **milk** in Italian, so if you go to Italy and order "latte", you get milk. If you want coffee with milk, you should order a **cappuccino** instead!
But aren’t they different coffee?
Correct, caffè-latte is a latte, cappuccino is its own thing!
In German “Latte” can be used as slang for boner.
If you go to a cafe theyll usually understand that you dont just want milk, even if that's what they hear
It’s pretty cool seeing latin connections. In welsh milk is llaeth, which is much more similarly spelt to french lait, but it’s still quite cool to see even italian be pretty similar to welsh.
I learned it the hard way with some really confused Italian baristas 😅
In my other native language besides Tagalog, Sambal, we use cardinal directions instead of left, right, front and back when describing the positions of objects. Get that shovel to your south. (instead of to your right, for example) Take my clothes in the closet east of my room. We are going west. (instead of just pointing the direction, or naming the place) I bought it from the store north of the bakery. Our words for east and west kinda mean "high ground" and "low ground" respectively. A mountain range is always at the east of our province, so the mountain range acts like our reference point for knowing what direction to say. But you only do this, looking at the mountain, when you're new to a place. Once you're familiar with a place, you would have a general feeling of where the cardinal directions are, that you would know your cardinal directions even when inside of houses and buildings and other places where you can't see the mountain. Our use of the cardinal directions is inexact however. For example, say, a store is actually northwest of the bakery, but the road in general is going north, then we would still use our word for north to describe the position of store relative to the bakery. And this is the case for everything. The east of your room may not be truly east, what you consider to be the "east" of your room depends on what cardinal directions you use to describe the directions of the road in front of your house.
In Spanish, 'esposa' means 'wife' and 'esposas' means 'handcuffs.' 😁 I almost fell off my chair when I found that out. I guess 'ball & chain' would've been a little too obvious. 😂
It is just a word that sounds funny to a foreigner but in Romanian we have the word ,,lalea" (tulip), tulips will be ,,lalele" and the tulips is going to be ,,lalelele". To add more "l" you could say ,,lalelele lor" - their tulips.
60% of the last names of Vietnam 🇻🇳 are Nguyen. Chinese has Wang 王 （ King ） and Wong, but in Cantonese known as Ng and sounds like “mm”, I believe and means “ FIVE “ . Someone correct me if I am wrong, please. Hungarians say : “ egész ségedre “ ( “ To all your health “ ) if someone sneezes , BUT if you say “ egész segedre “, you are saying “ all over your butt “ ! ( using the dirty a** word )
\*seggedre, but yes otherwise :)
Oh, thanks for correcting me. Köszönöm szépen. ( = “ Thank you very much. “ )
Nagyon szívesen! (You're welcome)
Damn you speak a lot of languages
Tack så mycket. Jag gillar främmande språk, men det är mycket viktigt för mig att någon rättar mig. ( = “ Thanks so much. I like foreign languages, but it is very important to me that someone corrects me. “ ) I love foreign languages so much that I have lengthy conversations in Mandarin Chinese with natives from Taiwan 🇹🇼 , mainland China 🇨🇳 or Singapore 🇸🇬 , Spanish with natives from Hispanic countries ( for example, Mexico 🇲🇽 , Spain 🇪🇸, El Salvador 🇸🇻, Puerto Rico 🇵🇷 , South American countries, etc. ) , French with natives from France 🇫🇷 or French-speaking areas , German with natives from Germany 🇩🇪 , Swedish with natives from Sweden 🇸🇪, and attempt my Hungarian 🇭🇺 , Japanese 🇯🇵 , Dutch 🇳🇱 , Italian 🇮🇹 , Russian 🇷🇺 and Esperanto with natives from their respective countries .
There are native Esperanto speakers? It's a con lang.
Update : Wow ! Did you see on r/Esperanto the BABY listening to and answering back in Esperanto when his/her father asked her/him where their body parts such as nose, eyes, mouth, stomach, and feet were ? The baby was repeating the body part in Esperanto while pointing to it !!! Yes, there are. I met some. In France🇫🇷, I met a family who grew up speaking Esperanto and in Athens, Greece, at the Parthenon, a family from Albania 🇦🇱 was speaking it while seeing my green star ⭐️ Esperanto pin “clasped”onto my shirt or coat. I also heard it spoken on a bus in Amsterdam, stayed overnight with a lady in Athens who only knew Greek and Esperanto. I stayed overnight with the American president of an Esperanto organization in Rotterdam, Netherlands 🇳🇱 who spoke 100% Esperanto with his girlfriend and about 98% Esperanto with me, and met a bunch of Esperantists in Rome, Italy. They used to teach it in Iran 🇮🇷 and China 🇨🇳 and now they teach it in colleges in China 🇨🇳. Esperanto is NOT new. It was invented in 1887 and years ago, an almanac said there were 10 million speakers. It’s the easiest language I know with no exceptions that I know of except for song lyrics and poetry, I guess. There is even a subreddit called r/Esperanto.
Super cool! I studied Esperanto years ago using DuoLingo back when it was way more user-friendly. I totally joined the above mentioned subreddit. Thanks for pointing it out!
You’re very welcome. Super ! You go, girl !
*boy But thank you just the same.
Ng is 吴. In Mandarin Wu.
我非常高兴你纠正我的错误。我犯太多错误了。 ( = “ I am very grateful for your correcting my mistakes. I make too many errors. “ )
In Spanish, "las esposas" can mean either "wives" or "handcuffs." English is one of only a few languages that have more non-native speakers than native speakers. Two other examples are French and Swahili.
There is a YouTuber called Loic Suberville who explained this handcuff thing ones. Hilarious
If i said the word for school subject in norwegian i would probabily get banned
I'm intrigued now, haha. I'm guessing it might start with the letter 'n'? 🤔
It's "et fag".
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The word for “seal “, the animal 🦭in French is “phoque” that sounds SOOO close to the F word in English that it took another person on Reddit to use the IPA ( International Phonetic Alphabet ) to explain to me there was a SLIGHT difference in their pronunciations after I asked !!!
In Swedish, the corresponding word is "fack", with the a pronounced just like you suspect it is. The same word also means "union" and "slot".
In Swedish, the word “ fick “ is perfectly normal word because it is the past tense of “ att få ” ( to receive ), but it is the F word in German !!!
no it is f but i knew people would guess n lol
Брак (brak, pronounced as "bruck" or so) in Russian means both "marriage" and "defect" (as in defective, faulty items). So, naturally, there is a joke about "you wouldn't call a good thing 'marriage' ". It's a coincidence though, brak as marriage has Slavic origin (from a verb 'to take') and brak as a defect is borrowed from Germanic languages through Polish (the English verb 'to break' is its relative).
Use only one word in Malay language: sayang sayang, sayang sayang sayang? Sayang sayaaang sayang... English translation: Dear dear, do you love me? I love you very dearly...
We have the same in Mandarin ahaha, I think it's a meme or something, but with shí shí shǐ etc. It's a story.
þorn (thorn) is an old english letter with a TH prononciation. When printing was popularized and exported to the english speaknig world, þorn wasn't available, so they typically used "y" which is why you sometimes see things as "Ye olde ..." the ye part would actually be pronounced the same way as "the."
**Mayday** that you hear pilots say when their plane is going down in movies means help me in French. We spell it the way it sounds but the French spelling is "M'aidez" and it's pronounced the same.
Yeah, ˈm‿ɛ.de and ˈmeɪ.deɪ sound exactly the same.
With a French accent, Mayday is indeed pronounced the same as "m'aidez" ;)
For sure, it is known that all pilots have a French accent when pronouncing the word mayday ;)
Only if you really butcher the pronunciation.
The stress is slightly different but the English ay and the French é/ez sound identical in standard American pronunciation.
And pan pan pan is derived from French word panne (breakdown)
A fact even I wasn't aware of before starting taking with foreigners regularly is that, apparently, Brazilian Portuguese has too many synonyms/slangs for penis....!
I don't even speak any Portuguese but I know one Brazilian Portuguese slang word for penis, because I've read warnings about mispronouncing their word for bread.
Foreigners trying to buy bread is an endless source of fun :) Pão == bread Pau == penis
Wow, in Portugal (or at least in my region) pau just means a wooden stick. We say piça or pila for penis. It sucks to ask for batteries here.
'bom dia, quero uma pila tamanho grande, por favor?' O dono da loja: 😏 A few of ours: pinto, pau, pica, piroca, caralho, cacete, Bráulio, jubileu, mandioca, espada, salame, salsicha, linguiça, rola, benga, bengala, banana, estrovenga, jeba, beringela, pingulin, vara, anaconda, mastro, bilau. Those are the ones I remember now. There is more. Much more.
A few Polish words which sound a little naughty in English: * fakt - fact; sounds like f***ed * kant - 90 degree edge on an object or a straight edge crease in fabric; sounds like c**t * bicz - whip; sounds like b*tch * blady - pale; sounds like "bloody" which is slightly crass in some countries closely related to Britain * sitko - sieve; sounds like "sh*t-co", we're reaching a little now 😅 And one in reverse, the light globe manufacturer "Osram" sounds in Polish like the word meaning "I will sh*t all over".
In Spanish, Esposa means Wife, and Esposas means handcuffs
It isn't my language, but if you search any combination of two letters from the farsi-arabic script, it is bound to have at least one correct search result in Farsi. I have no idea why. With the exception of dirty words of course.
In Sepedi, When people hate each other, we say "Ba fošana ka noga e phela" meaning "Throwing a live snake at each other"
“Chim” in Vietnamese are both bird and penis
🇵🇭 Existing conversation we have in the Philippines: Q: bababa ba? A: bababa
Pet in English is an animal companion. Pet in valencian is a fart. Fart in valencian means to be fed up. There are also fartons which are delicious long pastries you dip in horchata
orxata!
I know, but I thought maybe people reading would be like "what's that?" I have to force myself to write it "horchata" :D
you don’t have to force you to do anything tho! if people don’t know what’s that they’ll look it up or ask!! :)
Very true . :)
In America you guys call a gun a “piece” but here in Scotland a piece just means a wee sandwich 🥪😂😂
A *wee* sandwich. Sounds yummy...
No that kind of wee 🤮😂😂
In Filipino (aka Tagalog), there are many variations of words with the same letters but once you change their vowel they mean something different every time. (Ex. Bola would mean ball, Bula would mean bubble, Bara would loosely translate to something like 'stuck' and Bira would mean 'to hit'.)
Not my language but my friends were chatting about this exact thing, one of them said how in mandarin, one of their filler words ("like," "um", "er") is na-ge. Depending on accent, very much sounds like nig-
It’s caused trouble: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/16/913693813/professor-is-at-center-of-controversy-over-chinese-word-that-sounded-like-racial I know a lot of native Chinese speakers who will pronounce it nei-ge while in China but in the US they pronounce it na-ge to avoid this very issue.
Giften in German means to poison
To poison would be vergiften and the poison is called Gift
Placenta in Latin means cake. 😋
Well, In Dutch, placenta is "moederkoek", and *koek*, in English is 'cake' (*moeder* is mother)
I really like that! 😂 I took a semester of Dutch, sort of by accident because I expected German to be listed under Deutsch and apparently don't know anything about reading or checking, but I always wish I had continued with the language.
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Worked at a call center and did have someone with porn in their first name.
Its the only language with the letter ř, do you know what it Is?
In Hungarian, syntax can change the emphasis of a sentence, but not the denotative meaning. You can put the subject, direct object, and indirect objects in any order, and the sentence means the same thing. The words will change form to tell you their grammatical function.
In some dialects in the Netherlands we say piepers to potatoes, which also can be translated to squicky.
on portuguese there are a lot of expressions using the word "cu" that means "ass" cuzão: aumentative of "cu" and can be used to reffer of a person who's rude cu na mão: "ass on the hand" .used when someone is/was scared of is/was in a situation of fear meu cu: "my ass" used as negation (teu cu "your ass" also works) nascer com o cu virado para a lua: "to be born with the ass towards the moon" someone who's lucky até o cu fazer bico: "until the ass pouts" until the limit cu do judas: "judas's ass" somewhere who's very far
Go on, check the word "end" in Swedish.
The word for for “keys” in my TL is ключі, which, I don’t see it, but I’ve been told out of context it kinda sounds like the English word >! Coochie !<
Sushi comes from two Japanese words that translate to vinegar rice, which is another name for sticky rice
It’s Sorcery and satanist groups often write in Hebrew aka my language to make the text look runic and mysterious, often times just making it complete gibberish and the letters are completely messed up, people really be thinking we write some dwarf text and shit. Even the popular manga manhwa or manhua (idk the difference) solo levelling used hebrew and called it runic text or whatever.
In Indonesian, word "sayang" has two meaning. 1. It means love. 2. It means pity
In hindi, when talking about plural things in a dismissive tone, we use a rhyming slang Eg-tea becomes chai-wai Grass becomes ghaas-foos The second terms dont mean anything, they are just variations in the first syllable of the first term, which is actually a word.
1. Listen to Russian translations of words book, fact and shield 2. If we can't answer directly, we just use all possible answers in one: "yes no maybe" (да нет наверное), which just means a very indecisive"no". 3. And with the words meaning "yes" (да) and kinda "well" (ну) as an interjection, can make answers yes and no, depending on their order. Well yes - yes Yes well - no
Everytime i say my native language is spanish, people either say "hola amigo" or starts singing despacito
In Japanese, they don’t say “I love you” like we do in English, it they say ビープビープ音レタス which means “your eyes sparkle like the stars” and it’s kinda cute how poetic of a language it can be. 😏
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