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This makes me wonder what English words are unique to English, kind of like "breakfast" (in the context of a Burmese tribe) mentioned at the top of the article.
by aji 10y ago
This makes me wonder what English words are unique to English, kind of like "breakfast" (in the context of a Burmese tribe) mentioned at the top of the article. There's gotta be a few, right?
- ubersync 10y agoTwerking.
- oneloop 10y agoIf you accept "modern" words like twerking,I would bet that English is the language with the biggest number of untranslatable words, for the simple reason that nowadays most culture is first produced in English.
- germanier 10y agoThere is plenty of (pop-)culture produced in other languages. It's just people not speaking those languages not noticing most.
- oneloop 10y agoThere's a couple of orders of magnitude more culture being produced English than any other language (I speak three other languages)
- germanier 10y agoI wouldn't be so sure that there is less produced in Mandarin than in English. Spanish and Arabic might be behind but definitely not an order of magnitude. Also don't forget things like the massive film industry producing in Hindi. Also, you original claim was that English produces more "culture" than all other languages combined which is definitely wrong. Not even one out of seven speaks English. Are you really claiming that English-speakers have on average more than six times the cultural output than non-English-speakers? (I also don't know what your definition "produced culture" is as life is not a game of Civilization, but that's besides the point.)
- jessriedel 10y agoI'd guess at least half of all technical philosophical terms in English are "untranslatable" in this sense.
- oneloop 10y agoIt'd be more appropriate to say that it's Burmanese that's uncommon for not having such a banal word.
- euske 10y agoEnglish words that don't exist in Japanese: * identity (the notion simply does not exist here) * fairness (we don't care this either) * racist (but it doesn't mean we don't have it, we're simply unaware of it) And yes, there's an awkward translation for these words, but they all sound very foreign. edit: added newlines Another edit: I read that words like "liberty", "equality" or even "love" didn't exist in Japanese until 19c, when people were importing Western documents to Japan. That's probably why we're still so behind of these things.
- wodenokoto 10y agoI had a Japanese ID card, when I lived in Japan. So the notion must exist.
- kazinator 10y ago"identity" has connotations; it doesn't just mean mathematical sameness (such that if x and y are connected by identity, they are in fact the same thing and not distinct). Like "what is my identity?" Or "It's important for individuals to feel that they have an identity".
- kazinator 10y agoetymonline.com dates the appearance of "racist" as a noun to 1932 and as an adjective to 1938.
- euske 10y agoThere's a difference between the word has a historical record and it was commonly used. These words did exist. I was saying they are simply not in widespread use like the ones in English.
- titanix2 10y agoLove existed in the language way before the XIX century: 'ai' (愛), 'koi' (恋) but interestingly enough, these are also loanwords (from Chinese).
- sdrothrock 10y agoTangentially related, but there's a short story written by Poul Anderson under the constraint of "pure English" -- that is, only English words of Germanic origin. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/students/dtc/students2011/maitland/fun/ http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/st...
- ccanassa 10y agoI think that "Bullying" is unique to English, at least there is not equivalent to it in Portuguese and we usually just borrow it from English
- kalleboo 10y agoIt's "mobbning" in Swedish https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobbning https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobbning