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Off-topic: I never understood why native English speakers use Sahara and desert and think they are different things. Sometimes they even say "Sahara desert".
by mrwnmonm 4y ago
Off-topic:
I never understood why native English speakers use Sahara and desert and think they are different things. Sometimes they even say "Sahara desert".
- jamal-kumar 4y agoThat prompted me to look up what 'sahara' and 'desert' are in Arabic - صحراء - Sahra' - Desert الصحراء الكبرى - alsahra' alkubraa - The big desert? What language are you coming from?
- mrwnmonm 4y agoI am an Arab, that's why I always notice it. صحراء means desert, any desert, not a specific one.
- jamal-kumar 4y agoYeah I think English does tend to do that a lot to foreign loan words, that's pretty interesting though, I guess you learn something new every day. The Anglosphere probably isn't the most polyglot out of all the spheres of languages.
- bcbrown 4y agoPerhaps this explanation will help. When I hear the word 'Sahara' I think of a physical place, in northern Africa. When I hear the word 'desert' I think of an ecological system, characterized primarily by low rainfall and sandy soils. When I think of the physical place in northern Africa that is denoted (in my language) by the word 'Sahara', I think of it as being an exemplar of the ecological system denoted by the word 'desert'. Near me, there's the Sonoran desert and the Great Basin desert. If I lived in eastern Asia I might think of the Gobi desert. There's many deserts. So while I take your point that 'Sahara', in a non-English language, denotes what I call in English 'desert', I would say that the phrase 'Sahara desert' could be interpreted to signify "the place on this planet, that could be characterized as having a desert ecosystem, that is described by the people who live nearby as 'Sahara'". For the people who do not know that 'Sahara' is used by some other people to denote what they think of when they say the word 'desert', the word 'desert' is not extraneous. But for you, who does, it is.
- mrwnmonm 4y ago"When I hear the word 'Sahara' I think of a physical place, in northern Africa. When I hear the word 'desert' I think of an ecological system, characterized primarily by low rainfall and sandy soils." I understand that... but Sahara means the latter in Arabic. Any desert is Sahara.
- kingofpandora 4y agoBut Sahara doesn't mean desert in English... Languages are littered with these kind of things. Like every language.
- mrwnmonm 4y agoDesert doesn't mean Sahara in Arabic, and they never say Desert Sahara. Do you see my point? It is just a small observation actually, not a big deal.
- kingofpandora 4y agoI understand your point, but not why you are surprised. If a non-Arabic speaker hears this place referred to as "sahara", why wouldn't other languages adopt it as "Sahara"? My adjacent point is that this is very common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tautological_place_names?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tautological_place_nam...
- mrwnmonm 4y agoDidn't know it is common, thanks for that reference.
- yucky 4y agoBecause there are many deserts, and the Sahara desert is just one of them. There is the Gobi desert, Mojave desert, Kalahari desert etc.
- kube-system 4y agoThe same reason English speakers often say “chai tea”. They speak English, not Arabic or Hindi, and those words haven’t been turned into loan words. Likely, because English has its own equivalent.
- mrwnmonm 4y agoYes, but that would mean it could be done from the other side too, English speaker say "Chai Tea", and an Arab speaker would say "Tea Chai", but AFAIK, they don't. Do Indians do that?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]