Since there’s no chance that people in the world’s seven thousand languages will mistakenly refer to something with the same word everywhere, the most logical thing you can do is look up foreign words. The better target is trade, which has been the historical driver of globalization, and its exotic products that have proven their worth and stability.
Among the names of things that come from a distant country, there are many that are almost universal, but are not. This is amazing
Pineapple, banana, orange and tea.
The name pineapple is similar to the word we use in many languages. Indigenous people of South America AbakasiIt was called, and this is also used in Brazilian Portuguese. However, the path of pineapple to conquer the world is immediately crossed by two international languages: while in English it means pine cone fruit. pineappleBut for other reasons it is also associated with pine in Spanish Peña.
Bananas have come so far, they are found almost everywhere Banana banana Audio line marks. However, in the Far East there are many local names, but there is another more general name in Arabic and Persian, which is Moses, Moses – And perhaps it comes from them that it is written in Latin as well contemplation its name.
The case of orange is very similar, which in most languages, orange Obsession orange. The exception here is that it has a Portuguese meaning Portuguese (or Portuguese fruit) in Albanian, Kurdish and Arabic, and of course it has a completely different name in Chinese.
When talking about China, tea is one of the simplest cases of a global product spread under several different names. In this case, it is on one side of the world You, tea, tea, On the other side beautiful girl, Depending on whether the first shipments came from the northern or southern regions of China.
There are two other words that have almost achieved complete world domination. One is a taxi and the other is paradise. the Taxi In the case of the Chinese and Arabs, who represent a large portion of the world’s population Car Rental He prefers to use a meaningful local set of words in these places
There’s no point in shouting at the curb that it’s a taxi.
In the case of tomatoes, they are indigenous to the Navatl language spoken by the Aztecs tomatoesIts origin Tomatoes, tomatoes Spread. The Italians had little sense of the linguistic dimensions of marketing, which is why the golden apple symbolizes them Pomodoro It was marketed under a name in our country, which probably appeared as a mirror translation from German, such as apple tomato. At that time, we already had many different fruits whose name tomato was a reference to the Garden of Eden mentioned in the Bible, but the one true tomato finally took its place.
Winners
With the mention of ancient Americans, we finally come to truly universal names: there are two words that mean the same thing in every language, and both come from the New World.
There’s a good chance they’ll know what we want even in a Chinese restaurant if we order coffee with our heads slightly bowed. Turk coffeeArabic coffeeSpanish CafeEnglish coffeeEverywhere in the world, it represents the bitter, foul-smelling drink that mom and dad drink to keep themselves moving.
The world doesn’t let children down either, they also have a word that everyone can understand: chocolate. The sweet spread across Spanish from the name of the drink made from cocoa reflects the phonetic preferences of a particular language (Chocolate and chocolate) followed, but remained known from German to Japanese.
Holy Grail
Of course, there are not only brands and commerce in the world, there is also science and psychoacoustics. From the latter comes the idea that since humans are a species, both physically and neurologically universal, it is natural for there to be sounds with the same meaning. Therefore, although we said in the opening sentence of our article, that the same word cannot occur independently in all languages, such a word does exist. this Huh? Obsession Huh?According to researchers at the Max Planck Institute, this expresses a lack of information or lack of understanding in all languages.
In the case of humans, everything is determined by the workings of culture in language as well, a Huh? However, it is not universal by chance, but by human evolution. If you like, the frog says brekki, the crow says it’s very bad, and the man says heh?
(Translation of bubbles, Duolingo, Language nerds)
