Submitted 1 week ago by LtDan@lemmy.zip to [deleted]
I know that between Chinese & Japanese, there’s vocabulary where the placement of each character differs but retains the same or related definition for the most part, like how 士兵 becomes 兵士 in Japanese, you get the drift. Technically something equivalent exists in Latin based languages such as Red Cross (EN) & Cruz Roja (ES).
| 日本語 | 中文 | ENG |
|---|---|---|
| 詐欺 | 欺詐 | Fraud |
| 苦痛 | 痛苦 | Pain |
| 脅威 | 威脅 | Threat |
| 講演 | 演講 | Lecture |
| 制限 | 限制 | Restriction |
Well, in English, UTC is an acronym for Coordinated Universal Time, and in French its Temps Universel Coordonné.
Now you may have noticed that neither of those actually makes UTC. This comes from a previous naming pattern for universal time (UT1, UT2, …) (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time ).
I mean, this happens pretty trivially with noun phrases in Spanish and English because Spanish is postpositive and English is prepositive.
There’s this related thing in linguistics which is quite fun, relating to the terms loanword and calque, which both mean “words originating from foreign languages”: The word calque is a loanword, and the word loanword is a calque.
A calque is a literal translation of the components of a word. One of the most commonly calqued words across all languages is skyscraper (in Chinese, it’s 摩天大楼, “sky-touching large building”). The word loanword is a calque of German Lehnwort (lehnen, to borrow + Wort, word).
A loanword is a word which is taken directly from another language and, with exceptions to fit the receiving language’s grammar and pronunciation, is not translated. An example of an English word which has been calqued into many languages is “okay”. The word calque is a loanword from French, where it means “copy”.
A super simple one, but “el” in Spanish and “le” in French are both forms of the word “the”
Even both singular masculine. In Italian, “le” exists too but that is feminine plural. This is the only real example so far posted here.
If we count romanizations of languages not normally written with the Latin alphabet, I think definite articles give us another one: “la” in French, Spanish, Italian, and Esperanto is a definite article, and if I’m not mistaken, “al” is one in Arabic.
Spanish loves to turn acronyms backwards: NATO-OTAN, UNO-ONU
It’s not our fault that your language is inverted.
¡Sí, por cierto! :)
ONU reverse
This is common when comparing acronyms of Germanic vs. Romance languages because the former tend to put adjectives in front of their noun, the latter after it. But acronyms aren’t really words.
Are we open for rotation? Cucumber in Swedish is “gurka”, while in Norwegian it’s “agurk”.
Bear in Ukrainian is “vedmid”, and in Russian it is “medved”.
There are also a few occasions in Japanese where both inversions are acceptable words, such as 理論 riron 'theory' and 論理 ronri 'logic', or 便利 benri 'convenient' and 利便 riben 'convenient (but fancy-sounding)'.
先輩 and 輩先 both mean a senior (as in rank relative to you) in Japanese. It seems like they mean ‘ancestor’ and ‘senior’ in Chinese per Google Translate.
True, but I think that one's a bit different, because 輩先 (usually written in katakana as パイセン) is a humorous slang term based off 先輩.
Note to any learners: not all words do this in Chinese/Japanese; plenty are the same in both borrowed from the other country.
This is not quite the same, but:
May day. (English)
M'aide. (French)
Help me. (English)
La Fête du Travail (French)
AI in English = IA in Spanish
olosta@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Weirdly, french has a loanword for walkie-talkie and it’s talkie-walkie.
Cheesus@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Ugh, this one drives me nuts, and I absolutely refuse to say ‘talkie-walkie.’ It’s even more funny because I’ve seen several boxes for 2-way radios in France that had the correct order of words in the description… The French are just so bad at English that it doesn’t matter.
palordrolap@fedia.io 1 week ago
The truth* is that the French are excellent at English, but they find it beneath them to speak it.
Therefore, I suspect that "talkie-walkie" is a deliberate attempt to annoy the English. A trap you have fallen straight into (even if you're not English).
*\ for some interpretation of that word