Comments on: Common Words

Question: Common Words

booksprite — Tue, 16 May 2006 10:06:20 -0800

Do you know any words which are common to many languages?

I'm interested in compiling a list of words which are commonly used in a range of different languages – the wider the range the better.

An example would be the Latin word veto, which according to Babel Fish is the same in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Dutch.

The words don't necessarily have to mean the same thing and may be proper nouns – but in order to keep things simple I would prefer to avoid technical words, such as chemical names.

Any ideas?

By: davidmsc

davidmsc — Tue, 16 May 2006 10:11:11 -0800

First thing that came to mind is the word "mom" and variations of same: mater, mother, mommy, ma, etc.

By: weapons-grade pandemonium

weapons-grade pandemonium — Tue, 16 May 2006 10:12:31 -0800

et cetera

By: blue_beetle

blue_beetle — Tue, 16 May 2006 10:14:43 -0800

ciao

By: blue_beetle

blue_beetle — Tue, 16 May 2006 10:15:00 -0800

also: Big Mac

By: dydecker

dydecker — Tue, 16 May 2006 10:16:11 -0800

By: Zozo

Zozo — Tue, 16 May 2006 10:17:36 -0800

Me.

By: box

box — Tue, 16 May 2006 10:18:45 -0800

Schwarzenegger

By: adamrice

adamrice — Tue, 16 May 2006 10:18:58 -0800

taxi

By: Wolfdog

Wolfdog — Tue, 16 May 2006 10:21:10 -0800

"Tea" is very similar in very many languages. So is "coffee".

"Hello" and "OK" seem to have invaded everywhere.

By: Steven C. Den Beste

Steven C. Den Beste — Tue, 16 May 2006 10:24:36 -0800

You'll have your best luck in coming up with such words by looking at inventions created in the 19th and 20th century: telephone, transistor, computer, laser, nylon, etc.

By: NortonDC

NortonDC — Tue, 16 May 2006 10:27:57 -0800

"No"

By: kittyprecious

kittyprecious — Tue, 16 May 2006 10:28:29 -0800

Suri and Maya have come up before...

By: charmston

charmston — Tue, 16 May 2006 10:31:19 -0800

I believe that "internet" is rather widely used.

By: JJ86

JJ86 — Tue, 16 May 2006 10:33:55 -0800

How about most of the -ion words. Revolution, diversion, division, etc. Wasn't there an SNL skit based on this?

By: driveler

driveler — Tue, 16 May 2006 10:39:05 -0800

Tobacco. I know it's the same in English, Japanese, and some European languages. Probably more.

By: mikel

mikel — Tue, 16 May 2006 10:46:09 -0800

wine (en), vin (fr), vino (it), vino (sp), wein (de), wijn (ned), viner (sw), vinho (pt), etc.

By: MonkeySaltedNuts

MonkeySaltedNuts — Tue, 16 May 2006 10:59:35 -0800

"ok" - shows up in even asian languages.

By: miagaille

miagaille — Tue, 16 May 2006 11:00:29 -0800

I find this to be sort of an odd question. There are three issues that I think need to be teased apart, because they bear heavily on what it means (to you, booksprite) for languages to share a word. A word that is shared between two languages can be either:

1. a borrowing. That is, the word is coined in one language and borrowed, with minimal change, into others. As Steven C. Den Beste notes, these are trivially easy to find in modern technical terminology.

2. a cognate. Cognates are words that are similar because the languages are related. For example, Spanish, French, and Italian are going to share lots of words because they're all descended from Latin.

3. a coincidence. Like the business about "Suri" meaning "pickpocket" in Japanese. Whatever the real or imagined etymology of the name, it clearly doesn't have anything to do with the Japanese language.

Coincidences are the most fun, because it lets you say things like "My name means penis in language X!!". In cognates, as noted with mother and wine, there is a lot of variability in the spellings and pronunciations because of natural phonological change that happens over time.

When you say you want to avoid technical words, I guess that sort of speaks to modern borrowings, like "internet", "telephone" and so on.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Tue, 16 May 2006 11:03:05 -0800

I'm interested in compiling a list of words which are commonly used in a range of different languages – the wider the range the better.
The words don't necessarily have to mean the same thing...

I'm sorry, I don't understand the question at all. If they don't mean the same thing, they're not the same word. What exactly are you looking for?

1) Words that are the same in form and (approximately) meaning: English and French revolution

2) Words that are vaguely similar in form and (approximately) the same in meaning (these will often be etymologically related): see mikel's 'wine' list above

3) Words that are the same in form but have different meanings: pot is Russian for 'sweat,' for example

By: languagehat

languagehat — Tue, 16 May 2006 11:03:38 -0800

On non-preview: what miagaille said.

By: JJ86

JJ86 — Tue, 16 May 2006 11:20:03 -0800

You have to also remember that the words taxi and telephone sound the same when spoken in russian but look entirely different visually than their english counterparts.

By: kimota

kimota — Tue, 16 May 2006 11:22:06 -0800

Apparently, ok is the most universally recognized word, and Coke is 2nd.

By: booksprite

booksprite — Tue, 16 May 2006 11:23:54 -0800

Thanks for the suggestions and comments so far. Although mikel's "wine" list is interesting, my preference would be for words that are in the same form (cf. miagaille and languagehat 3 > 1 >>2).

By: miagaille

miagaille — Tue, 16 May 2006 11:36:57 -0800

Here's a thought: how about onomatopoeic words? They're "coincidentally" similar in some sense, because there is usually no borrowing or common descent, but they derive from sounds that are absolutes, regardless of language.

See, for example, a list of the words for animal sounds in multiple languages

By: StarForce5

StarForce5 — Tue, 16 May 2006 11:45:36 -0800

I forgot where but I read it but "milk" is very similar in many languages, I guess.

By: plep

plep — Tue, 16 May 2006 11:50:55 -0800

'Que'/'ke'.

'What' in French, Spanish, Nepali, and numerous other Indo-European languages.

By: wackybrit

wackybrit — Tue, 16 May 2006 11:50:55 -0800

"Stop" is quite common on road signs around the world IME, even if the local word for "stop" isn't "stop". Airport, too.

By: Mean Mr. Bucket

Mean Mr. Bucket — Tue, 16 May 2006 12:02:50 -0800

Hello.

By: beth

beth — Tue, 16 May 2006 12:05:53 -0800

Meow.

By: elquien

elquien — Tue, 16 May 2006 12:10:50 -0800

The English word "super" is used to mean the same thing in a lot of languages. I don't know that it's necessarily an official word in other languages' dictionaries, but it's used a lot nonetheless.

By: killdevil

killdevil — Tue, 16 May 2006 12:12:48 -0800

You can find lots of words that are similar across many, many Western languages if you learn a little about reconstructed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary and grammar.

As a specific example, the word "apple" is a cognate in tens or hundreds of languages.

By: booksprite

booksprite — Tue, 16 May 2006 12:19:49 -0800

Right, beth, but following the link in miagaille's last response, meow is only used in English and Thai!

By: zsazsa

zsazsa — Tue, 16 May 2006 12:38:40 -0800

I've always heard that "taxi", mentioned above, is extremely universal.

By: PuGZ

PuGZ — Tue, 16 May 2006 13:29:36 -0800

Like zsazsa and those before zsazsa, I have heard that 'taxi' is common to almost all European languages.

By: JJ86

JJ86 — Tue, 16 May 2006 13:48:38 -0800

If you want just words that look alike but sound and mean something else, then how about this one: "нор". In english it means a "little jump" but in russian it is pronounced "nor" and means according to babelfish, "the burrows". The cyrillic letters only look like latin letters but are much different.

In this exercise are you looking for phonetic similarities or written similarities? Obviously languages like Russian, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, etc have no written similarities but many phonetic similarities.

By: jimmythefish

jimmythefish — Tue, 16 May 2006 15:00:31 -0800

'Café' is fairly standard for coffee.

By: eritain

eritain — Tue, 16 May 2006 15:11:40 -0800

Chocolate, czekolad, шоколад, call it what you will. Various pronunciations and spellings, but none more different from one another than the modern English word is from the original Nahuatl xocolatl. (Apologies if I misspelled that; IANAMesoamericanist.)

By: k8t

k8t — Tue, 16 May 2006 15:41:31 -0800

normal and problem

By: Alison

Alison — Tue, 16 May 2006 15:43:53 -0800

'Book' is another good one. The latin root 'liber' or 'libri' is quite common, as is 'kitab' (arabic).

By: Alison

Alison — Tue, 16 May 2006 15:47:57 -0800

Also, 'pan' for bread. It is from Portuguese and Spanish, but the same word is used in Thai and Japanese

By: footnote

footnote — Tue, 16 May 2006 16:50:31 -0800

sofa.

By: TimeFactor

TimeFactor — Tue, 16 May 2006 17:05:13 -0800

Fuck

By: WaterSprite

WaterSprite — Tue, 16 May 2006 17:43:50 -0800

knyga, meaning "book", is the same in Russian and Lithuanian.

By: Quietgal

Quietgal — Tue, 16 May 2006 18:08:43 -0800

Salad / salat / salata etc. Pretty common in western European languages, also Slavic languages and Middle Eastern as well IIRC. I've seen "salad" cognates on menus in Asia, but I don't know whether this is a recent borrowing or harks back to Sanskrit roots.

By: TheRaven

TheRaven — Tue, 16 May 2006 19:47:46 -0800

television (and close variations) is the same in most languages except German; ditto for football, except in Italian and, of course, the American sub-dialect of English.

By: attercoppe

attercoppe — Tue, 16 May 2006 20:18:09 -0800

An example would be the Latin word veto, which according to Babel Fish is the same in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Dutch.

Babel Fish, while generally a good resource, is not reliable for this. If it cannot translate a word, it simply returns the spelling it was fed. I can't say whether or not "veto" is spelled v-e-t-o in all the languages you listed, but be aware that the Fish can't tell you for sure, either.

By: speedo

speedo — Tue, 16 May 2006 20:21:31 -0800

wii.

By: flabdablet

flabdablet — Tue, 16 May 2006 21:31:08 -0800

Pepsi Blue!

(somebody had to)

By: user92371

user92371 — Tue, 16 May 2006 22:16:56 -0800

Post. Which I read was the reason Bjork chose it for her album title.

Post in Japanese is "posuto" and the "u" is mostly silent.

By: lloyder

lloyder — Wed, 17 May 2006 04:55:37 -0800

For those who've said Taxi - in Welsh it's Tacsi

Have I missed Goal?

By: jimmythefish

jimmythefish — Wed, 17 May 2006 10:40:15 -0800

I've never been anywhere where a shawarma isn't a shawarma.

By: shokod

shokod — Wed, 17 May 2006 22:15:17 -0800

I think Banana and Sugar are very similar sounding in most languages (not to each other, of course)