Why is the word for coffee the same in every language?

[Turpentine]

Coffee- English
Kaffee- German
Cafe- French
Ko phe- Vietnamese
Khaphe- Greek
kohhi- Japanese

I know that "coffee" is also roughly the same in portuguese and Chinese and probably a bunch of other languages.
I think this is really odd, I looked it up and the origin of the word, according to Merriam-Webster, is from 1598, from the Italian word "cafee". Ok. So why has that partcular word spread all over the world?

Are there any other words that are almost the same word in almost every language?

Also, does anyone know a language in which the word for "coffee" sounds nothing at all like the ones I could come up with?

[BobT]

Perhaps because it was Europeans who popularized coffee throughout the world and all the other languages borrowed it from them.

Does anyone know what any of the indigenous people of the Americas called coffee?

[Diceman]

I think BobT's got it. Coffee was introduced to the Old World through a very small number of sources (probably just a few Spanish traders). One they settled on a name for the stuff, that name was used by everyone who bought or drank it.

[BobT]

For the record, I should say that I was making a WAG.

[SaxFace]

How could you forget Latvian, one of the most important languages of this century?

Coffee = Kafija

[Akatsukami]

BobT asks: Does anyone know what any of the indigenous people of the Americas called coffee?
Nothing, as the coffee tree is not indigenous to the Americas.

"Coffee" is a recent loan across many languages (and coffee, of course, is a recent loan across many cultures). The spread of the word (and substance) was made quicker and easier by the increased mobility provided by, and political, etc. dominance of, Europeans in the past few centuries.

(The word "coffee", incidentally, does derive from Italian caffè, but that word itself is a loan, via Turkish, of Arabic qahwah, which in turn is probably from Geez (which is a Hamitic language formerly spoken in Ethiopia, as well as an exclamation :) )).

Other recent loans to many languages are "cigar" and such brand names as "Coke®" (of course, "cigar" did not originate in English).

[JeffB]

I read an interesting factoid once (don't know if it's true) that the most common word across languages is no. The second most common is taxi. I wonder where coffee fits in the rankings.

[JubilationTCornpone]

Klingon = raktajino

So there! So much for that theory.

[Sauron]

Semi-educated WAG here ...

I recall reading that coffee originated in the Arabic world, and was a popular drink at mosques, since it helped one stay awake during the long services. Since the drink's popularity originated in one particular spot on earth, the phonetic version of the drink's name spread outward from there (when coffee was traded); only the spelling changed based on the local lingo.

[bibliophage]

Originally posted by Turpentine
Are there any other words that are almost the same word in almost every language? Plenty of them, especially technical terms, e.g., "telephone", "Internet", and "molybdenum".

French téléphone
German Telefon
Portuguese telefone
Italian telefono
Spanish teléfono
Swedish telefon

The following can't be displayed exactly in this font:

Japanese terefon (Japanese also has an unrelated synonym "denwa")
Greek telephono
Russian telephon


Although there are probably others, Icelandic (which is quite resistent to loan words) is the only language I could find that doesn't have a related word for telephone. Their word is talsími, loosely "speaking wire."

[astorian]

I think that there are more and more words that cut across languages. In general, I suspect that the more recently a word was coined, the more likely it is to be adopted with minimal or no changes throughout the world. I mean, if a new product is invented in Japan, let's say... the karaoke machine, for example... are Americans more likely to make up a new, English word for it, or just to adopt the Japanese word "karaoke"? In the same way, if a popular American product catches on in Europe, most Europeans will use the English name for it, rather than making up a new word in their language (yeah, I know that L'Academie Francaise makes up "French" words for everything, but nobody in France pays them much mind!).

Well, in the grand scheme of human history, coffee is a relatively recent development. Once it was introduced throughout Europe, most Europeans were inclined to call it by the name it was given. Only minor variations in spelling and pronunciation resulted.

[Kepi]

To add to the list, in Hawaiian:

coffee = kope
telephone = kelepona

[TheLoadedDog]

Originally posted by bibliophage
Originally posted by Turpentine
Are there any other words that are almost the same word in almost every language? Plenty of them, especially technical terms, e.g., "telephone", "Internet", and "molybdenum".



I suspect the simple word "Ma", or close approximations of it, pops up in quite a few languages.

The fact that all these M words for "mother" appear, and that "Ma" means the same thing in languages as geographically and linguistically removed as English and Vietnamese, and that it is obviously not some recently coined, or technical, word such as "karaoke" has me stumped.

Is it more to do with certain sounds being more natural for very small children to utter? I would suspect this is the case, although most little kids tend to say "mum (or mom)" a little later than they attempt the apparently easier "Dadda dad dad da" type words (much to the chagrin of mothers everywhere).

[Aestivalis]

Originally posted by bibliophage
The following can't be displayed exactly in this font:

Japanese terefon (Japanese also has an unrelated synonym "denwa")
Greek telephono
Russian telephon


Although there are probably others, Icelandic (which is quite resistent to loan words) is the only language I could find that doesn't have a related word for telephone. Their word is talsími, loosely "speaking wire."

The Japanese "denwa" is probably derived from the similar Chinese (well, at least in Cantonese) "deen-wa". Loosely translated as "electric voice."

[handy]

I have a dictionary, a very handy thing, Websters:
Etymology:
Italian & Turkish; Italian caffe, from Turkish kahve, from Arabic qahwa

Don't look like 'coffee' in all languages to me.

[RealityChuck]

Looks don't matter; pronunciation does. The "q" in arabic is pronounced "k", for instance. And "v" can easily be softened to an "f" sound. Additionally, it's not unusual for some languages to change "w" to "v."

[dtilque]

There's a fair number of words that are borrowed across many languages. There's a saying among linguists that every language has coffee and mango. Others come from sports: polo, golf, music: opera, jazz, biology: virus, and as has been pointed out, technology: radio, radar, modem, laser, plus some miscellaneous terms like sauna and veto. No doubt you can find more for these categories.

I once tried to find the word spelled the same in the most number of languages, but I was defeated by the lack of good bilingual dictionaries available in all the languages I was looking at.

[Johanna]

The Arabic q is not pronounced the same as k. The articulation is further back, at the uvula.

The Arabic word [b]qahwah[/i] is not derived from Ethiopic (a related South Semitic language), but from a native Arabic root. Originally it meant 'wine', but after it caught on in Arabia, the word was adapted for the new beverage as well. So it could be generalized as 'a dark-colored strong-flavored beverage with psychoactive properties.' Arabic did borrow a coffee word from Ethiopic, however: the name for the coffee plant is bun in Ethiopic and bunn in Arabic. No doubt the Bunn company, manufacturer of commercial coffee equipment, will be pleased to know that.

Turkish kahve is simply what happens to Arabic words when adapted to Turkish pronunciation. The letter q has been dropped in modern Turkish spelling, but when written in Ottoman Turkish in the Arabic alphabet, it used the letter qaf. The Arabic vowel a remained "a" in Turkish after a back consonant (like q), but shifted to "e" after a front consonant. Arabic w always becomes "v" in Turkish. The h in the middle of qahwah was actually pronounced with aspiration in Arabic and Turkish, even though followed by a consonant (like the initial /hw-/ sound of English "wh-").

Italian has no /h/ sound. But the unvoiced h in Turkish kahve went to make the v unvoiced as well, so it became "f" which then rebounded on the adjacent h, making it double "ff". Italian caffè preserved the accent on the final syllable which is typical of Turkish pronunciation.

Japanese kohi substituted "h" for f. Why? In Japanese, the four sounds [p], [b}, [f], and [h] are all considered, for historical/etymological reasons, variants of the same sound, and are written with the same kana characters. The Japanese [h] and [f] are two allophones of the same phoneme: it sounds like h when it comes before a, e, o; it sounds like f only before u. So English /f/ adapted to nineteenth-century Japanese pronunciation came out [h] if it wasn't followed by u. Present-day Japanese borrows the [f] sound in any position, but when coffee was borrowed in the 19th century, they hadn't gotten used to that yet.

[Johanna]

There's a saying among linguists that every language has coffee and mango.Then the linguists are wrong.

Coffee is bun in Amharic.

Mango is âmra in Sanskrit and âm in Hindi. In Tamil, the word from which "mango" originated, they call it mam-palam.

[Kyla]

The guy who created modern Hebrew, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, made up a bunch of new words for non-biblical items, like telephones. Some of them got picked up, but the loads were completely ignored. Hence, the Hebrew word for telephone is (get ready for it) "telephone". BUT, they got creative when it came to cell phones, which are called "pelephones" (well, the cause it's Hebrew, the plural is actually "pelephonim"). Not sure why.

Anyway, coffee in Hebrew is "cafe".

[Opus1]

I've been told that the Chinese word(s) for telephone is te le fung, but I have no personal knowledge of Chinese to back that up.

Kiwi is also the same in virtually every language.

[TitoBenito]

In Manderin its Dian3 hua3 which translates to something like electric speech I think. Te le fung could very well be another way, but i wouldn't know.

[Coldfire]

Some Dutch words:

Coffee is koffie [kô-fee] (I read somewhere that the Dutch settlers introduced the term to (American) English - although it could have been known to the actual English as well, I suppose). Likewise, I was told that the American English word "Boss" is a phonetic derivative of the dutch word baas, meaning same. Likewise, "cookie" came from the Dutch equivalent koekje [cook-yuh]. Does anyone know a good site to verify this sort of thing?

Telephone is telefoon [tay-lay-phone]. The words for mom and dad are mama and papa.

I can only think of one globaly universal word that is Dutch in origin, and in fact isn't even altered in other languages. Unfortunately, that word is Apartheid.

[Fugazi]

Koreans took the word coffee, pronounced caw pee, but didn't take telephone. Their word is pronounced Chun hwa

[Spiny Norman]

A couple of Danish ones, FWIW:

Coffee = Kaffe (Well-bred Danes spoke German or French among each other when coffee was introduced, so keeping the word was only natural.)

Telephone = Telefon

Oddly enough, telescope = "Kikkert", lit. "peeker" or "peeking device". (Well, the word "teleskop" is used as well, but what's the fun in that ?)

I know of but one Danish word exported to the world at large, at least in modern times: "Ombudsman(d)".

S. Norman

[Coldfire]

We use telescoop, or the more mundane sterrekijker. "Star watcher"! Makes much more sense.

Incidently, the Dutch always crack up at hearing South Africans speak. They use such descriptive words. E.G. where we say lift for, well, "lift" or "elevator", a South African will call it a hijsbak, literally meaning something like "hoisting tank". Which is precisely what it is, but its sounds SO funny. ;)

[Popup]

[national pride]
Spiny claims:

I know of but one Danish word exported to the world at large, at least in modern times: "Ombudsman(d)".

Sorry to disapoint you, Websters (http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=ombudsman) claims it comes from Swedish.
[/national pride]

Coffee = kaffe
Telephone = Telefon
telescope = teleskop (or rather kikare)
in Swedish as well.
(Written Danish and Swedish may look similar, but the pronunciation is different! I would probably have serious problems understanding our friend Spiny, while I can read a Danish paper.)

[Spiny Norman]

tc, I hate to admit it, but it looks like you're right - I'll never trust my 4th grade teacher again. Looks like I have some crow-eating to do, pass the condiments.

[sullen voice]
Damn, have no Danish words made it big ?
[/sullen voice]

[Floater]

Originally posted by tc
Sorry to disapoint you, Websters (http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=ombudsman) claims it comes from Swedish.


And so does smorgasbord.

[Coldfire]

Originally posted by Spiny Norman
[sullen voice]
Damn, have no Danish words made it big ?
[/sullen voice]LEGO!!

[Patty O'Furniture]

Ko Phe sounds more Indonesian to me. Cà Phê is how I write it in Vietnamese, and that's how I see my friends write it although I don't deny that "ko phe" might be some bizarro jungle dialect.

Telephone = Ðiên thoai

Mango = Xoai

No = Không

[Johanna]

In literary Urdu, according to the dictionary, they use the Arabic word for coffee: qahvah. But in everyday colloquial Urdu they just say kâfî from English; in Hindi it's kâphî. In Iran they use the Arabic word qahvah, but it's pronounced "ghahveh".

The African language Hausa, like Urdu, uses either gahawa from Arabic or kofi from English. Swahili is another language that's big on Arabic loanwords: they say kahawa.

All the European forms of the word like Kaffee, café, etc. came from the Italian caffè, since the Venetians, who traded a lot with the Turks, were the first western Europeans to come in contact with the stuff. When coffee spread around the world to Asia, it was the English word that Asian languages borrowed. In Malaysia they say kopi. Malay doesn't distinguish the sounds of p and f. Once in a Malaysian university a student asked me where was the coffee machine. I directed him to the cafeteria. But he wanted to copy some papers.

[Johanna]

Finnish kahvi must have come directly from Turkish.
Lithuanian kava looks Tahitian, but probably came from Arabic.
Russian kofe looks like a blend of the English and French forms.

[bibliophage]

Originally posted by Spiny Norman
[sullen voice]
Damn, have no Danish words made it big ?
[/sullen voice] Danish narhval (or possibly the same word in Norwegian) is the root of

Dutch narwal
Spanish narval
English narwhal
Italian narvalo
French narval
Swedish narval
German Narwal
Portuguese narval

The Icelandic word for the creature, náhvalur, is related but probably not derived from Danish.

Also, the oersted (a c.g.s. unit of magnetic intensity) is named after a Danish physicist, and the SI prefix femto- (10-15) is either Danish or Norwegian.

[dtilque]

Some time ago, I compiled a list of languages that English has borrowed words from. I tried to find a word that was unambiguously borrowed from each language rather than possibly from several related languages.

Because Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are, linguistically speaking, the same language1 and share almost all their vocabulary, it was difficult to do this for them. There were lots of words that were from Scandinavian and some from either of two Scandinavian languages, but few from just one. Norweian was the easiest, allowing me to choose from ski, slalom, vole, and lemming (and some other less common words). Swedish had the aforementioned smorgasboard and ombudsman. But Danish was especially difficult. The only one I could find was skoal (obviously not an international word).


1 This is a classic case of the linguistic truism2 "a language is a dialect with an army". The difference between what is spoken in Stockholm and in Copenhagen is probably no greater than the difference between Boston and Atlanta. Yet Bostonians and Atlanteans both speak English.

2 Note to Jomo Mojo: linguistic truisms and sayings, like those in other disciplines, are not to be taken as 100% factual.

[jb_farley]

talsími

the fuck?!? anyway, in regards to cross-words, I believe wine is the one to beat. although it evolved from the earlier root [oino], the intial dipthong got velarized (is that right?)

so anyway, "wine" will give you a run for your money, 'coffee'. at least if you stick to the romance/greco-roots. oh, proto-indo-european, too.


jb

[samclem]

Buried in this thread is Akatsukami's fact that coffee was originally from Ethiopia. The Arabs got it from them.

From my book on coffee Pocket Guide to Coffees and Teas by Kenneth Anderson; the Arabs made two distinctive drinks from the coffee bean,one of which bounya became known, generically as kahwah or caoue. The Turks stole it from the Arabs. Then the Europeans travelling to Arab lands in the mid/late-1500's.

[Johanna]

Originally posted by jb_farley
anyway, in regards to cross-words, I believe wine is the one to beat. although it evolved from the earlier root [oino], the intial dipthong got velarized (is that right?)

so anyway, "wine" will give you a run for your money, 'coffee'. at least if you stick to the romance/greco-roots. oh, proto-indo-european, too.
Classical Greek had oinos for 'wine', but in the earliest stage of Greek, the word began with a digamma (w): woinos. Corresponding to Latin vinum.

The word for wine was a loanword from Semitic to Indo-European. Compare Arabic wayn, Hebrew yayn. (Arabic initial w- always corresponds to Hebrew initial y-; for example the words for 'boy': walad and yeled, respectively.) There were other Semitic loanwords to IE, for example the word for 'seven': sab‘at- in Arabic, septm in Proto-Indo-European.

Japanese waino, however, is a modern loanword from English wino.

[Johanna]

Originally posted by samclem
Buried in this thread is Akatsukami's fact that coffee was originally from Ethiopia. The Arabs got it from them.

From my book on coffee Pocket Guide to Coffees and Teas by Kenneth Anderson; the Arabs made two distinctive drinks from the coffee bean,one of which bounya became known, generically as kahwah or caoue. The Turks stole it from the Arabs. Then the Europeans travelling to Arab lands in the mid/late-1500's. I think I mentioned already pretty plainly that the Arabs got the name for the coffee plant from Ethiopia. The coffee plant is native to Ethiopia. Coffee-drinking spread from Yemen, the first part of Arabia that caught on to it. In the fifteenth century. The local legends in Mukhá, Yemen (the origin of Mocha coffee) tell that it was a Sufi saint named ‘Alî ibn ‘Umar al-Shâdhilî who first taught the Yemenis about drinking coffee.

Historically there is a very good basis for coffee's transferral from Ethiopia to Yemen. For several thousand years there have been traffic and migrations back and forth between the two countries. The Ethiopic languages (Ge‘ez, Amharic, Tigre, Tigriña, Harari) are derived from ancient South Arabian spoken in the Himyarite kingdoms of Yemen. The royal line of Ethiopia traced its descent from the Queen of Sheba (Saba’ was another ancient kingdom of Yemen). In the 6th century Yemen was ruled by an Ethiopian dynasty. Coffee is not the only psychoactive plant found on both sides of the Red Sea: there is also qât.

samclem, your source was slightly garbled. The Arabic word bunyah means 'structure'. The word you're thinking of is bunn, which Arabic borrowed from Ethiopic. Qahwah is made from the seeds (so-called beans) of the coffee fruit. The other kind of drink made from the coffee plant is called qishr, made from the pulp of the coffee fruit. The part other countries throw away after getting the beans out. In Yemen they dry the fruit pulp and brew a sort of tea with it. It doesn't have caffeine.

The "Turks stole it"? Actually, I think they bought it and paid for it. It was a commercial commodity, after all. It was Venetians trading with Turks who first brought coffee to western Europe.

[Akatsukami]

Jomo Mojo writes: The word for wine was a loanword from Semitic to Indo-European. Compare Arabic wayn, Hebrew yayn. (Arabic initial w- always corresponds to Hebrew initial y-; for example the words for 'boy': walad and yeled, respectively.) There were other Semitic loanwords to IE, for example the word for 'seven': sab‘at- in Arabic, septm in Proto-Indo-European.
I beg to differ. The Semitic and Indo-European words for wine are generally considered to be loanwords into both languages from an Old Mediterranean root *woin-.

The sab‘at/*septm correspondence is now generally though to be coincidence, although some have offered it in the past as evidence of an Indo-Semitic proto-language.

[ElvisL1ves]

A semi-related question: Are there any major world languages that have NOT adopted the American "Okay"? It always makes me smirk to hear Italians or Chinese slip it into their conversations.

And Akatsukami, no offense intended here, but your sig line is starting to make me worry a little about you, okay?

[EB]

I saw an interesting linguistic exhibit in a museum in Macau that demonstrated that, in a great many of the world's languanges, the word for "tea" is related either to the Mandarin Chinese word "cha" (e.g. chai, etc.) or the Fujian Chinese word "te" (e.g. tea, etc.) I don't remember all of the examples. (It seems not inconceivable that cha and te could be reated through an intermediate consonant sound like "ts". But Im no linguist.)

"Bye-bye" and "sorry" seem to have made their way into standard Cantonese.

[Johanna]

You can trace the migration of the Mandarin word cha2 (formerly spelled ch‘a) across the Silk Road, through Central Asia into Russia, India, and Turkey. Because the Silk Road's terminus was in Mandarin-speaking country, northern China. In Central Asia the word was Persianized by the addition of a final -y glide. This is a characteristic of the Persian language: any open monosyllable word ending in a long vowel can have a -y added. So cha2 became chây in Persian. It's also chai in Russian, câî in Hindi, çay in Turkish.

In southeast China, south of the Yellow River, the Fujian or Amoy-Hokkien pronunciation of the character for tea was pronounced [te]. It was mostly Chinese speakers from this language area who migrated to Southeast Asia, or Nanyang as the Chinese call it. Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. Thus the word for tea is teh in Malay. The Portuguese and Dutch were the first Europeans to bring the article as well as the word for it to western Europe. The fact that English, French, Italian, German, etc. call it tea or thé or something like that is owed to the Dutch East India Company.

I don't know whether in some Chinese dialect there exists a form with the intermediate [ts]. I do know that in general the southern versions of Chinese are much more conservative as to consonants, while Mandarin is more innovative. IANAS (I am not a Siniticist), but I guess the proto-Chinese word began with t-.

In Polish they call it by a compound word: herba-te (which doesn't mean 'herbal tea' but just tea, Camellia sinensis).

[Akatsukami]

<utter hijack>
ElvisL1ves writes: And Akatsukami, no offense intended here, but your sig line is starting to make me worry a little about you, okay?

(He was, of course, referring to that sig block that read: "I must say that I was disappointed by Gore's concession. I was hoping for a more traditional concession. You know, the kind where Gore would be sitting alone in a room and someone comes in and places a revolver loaded with one round on the table beside him." -- Robert Bruce Thompson)

Good of you to worry about me. Whilst I agree that references to Al Gore (who?) are now as dated as references to Charles Lindberg, I just hadn't found another suitably amusing quotation...until recently.
</utter hijack>

[Johanna]

1) When two different words come from the same source etymon, but became differentiated along the way, they're called "doublets." For example, loyal and legal. One was filtered thru medieval French, the other was borrowed directly from the original Latin form.

The existence of two forms of the Chinese word for tea has made possible a new doublet in English: tea vs. "chai." The trendy "new" drink of recent years, "chai" has now become a naturalized English word.

And you've got all these Americans imagining that "chai" means a specially prepared tea with sugar and spice and milk. When in fact it just means 'tea', plain & simple, any old kind of tea, in Hindi. In India it so happens that tea is almost always prepared with milk and sugar. (There's something atavistic about returning to the blissful comfort of the infant nursing from mother's breast. Indian chai gives that experience through its sweet, warm, milky quality--however, for grownups it has the caffeine kick added. No wonder the stuff is so addictive!) Black tea in India is only given to sick people and thought of as more medicinal than pleasurable. Most everyday chai in India doesn't have the spice masala added; they just do that once in a while; many Indians never spice their tea. The linguistic phenomenon is "marked" versus "unmarked" forms: in English tea is the "unmarked" word for Camellia sinensis--it has the most general meaning, applied to any kind of tea. The new development in English is to have chai as the "marked" form: limited to a certain specially prepared kind of tea. In Hindi, chai is unmarked. If you go to India and want to order what Americans think of as "chai," you have to qualify it with a modifier and say "Masala chai, please."

2) The other thing about our word tea which was transmitted to western Europe through Malay teh is that in the 17th century, English speakers used the original Malay pronunciation: tea rhymed with "day". Shakespeare made a pun with "reason" and "raisin" becase in his day they were pronounced the same. In the late 18th century, the Great Vowel Shift was still winding up, and one of the last changes was to shift the sound of "ea" in such words from /e:/ to /i:/. But in Ireland that shift didn't happen, so the more conservative sound became characteristic of Ireland English. There was a 19th century Irish-American work song with the lines:

O, ye work all day
for sugar in your tay....

[ruadh]

... however, the Irish word for "tea" is tae - and it rhymes with the English "day". "Tea" in everyday Hiberno-English doesn't.

[hibernicus]

Originally posted by Jomo Mojo
English speakers used the original Malay pronunciation: tea rhymed with "day". Shakespeare made a pun with "reason" and "raisin" becase in his day they were pronounced the same. In the late 18th century, the Great Vowel Shift was still winding up, and one of the last changes was to shift the sound of "ea" in such words from /e:/ to /i:/. But in Ireland that shift didn't happen, so the more conservative sound became characteristic of Ireland English.
Alexander Pope has the line (in Rape of the Lock) "doth sometimes cousel take, and sometimes tay". It sounds strangely Irish.
ruadh, some Irish people do say "tay" in English, and indeed some say "cha" (older members of my mother's side and my father's side of the family, respectively).

[ruadh]

ruadh, some Irish people do say "tay" in English, and indeed some say "cha" (older members of my mother's side and my father's side of the family, respectively). [/B]

You're more the expert here than me :) but it strikes me as a peculiarly Dublin, and more peculiarly working-class Dublin, pronunciation. I can't recall ever hearing it in any other Irish accent.

[MEBuckner]

The fact that all these M words for "mother" appear, and that "Ma" means the same thing in languages as geographically and linguistically removed as English and Vietnamese, and that it is obviously not some recently coined, or technical, word such as "karaoke" has me stumped.

Is it more to do with certain sounds being more natural for very small children to utter? I would suspect this is the case, although most little kids tend to say "mum (or mom)" a little later than they attempt the apparently easier "Dadda dad dad da" type words (much to the chagrin of mothers everywhere).
My American Heritage Dictinary notes that ma- (root of the Latin mamma, "breast", and hence root of "mammal", etc.; and, in the extended form mater--ma- with the suffic -ter denoting kinship--root of the Latin and Greek mater and meter and all their derivatives and the English "mother") is "an imitative root derived from the child's cry for the breast (a linguistic universal found in many of the world's languages, often in reduplicated form)." The name of the Mande branch of the Niger-Congo language family in West Africa comes from the same source.

Another baby talk root is baba-, "imitative of unarticulated or indistinct speech; also a child's nursery word for a baby and for various relatives." It is thus the root of the English words "baby" and "babble"; the Italian bambino; the Greek barbaros or "barbarian" ("foreigner who speaks incomprehensible gibberish"); and the Slavic baba (as in babushka), i.e., old woman or grandmother.

[weapons grade bullonium]

I would have thought it was the reverse, that we have more words for coffee than Inuits do for snow, java, joe, mud...

[Greg Charles]

Originally posted by Attrayant
Ko Phe sounds more Indonesian to me. Cà Phê is how I write it in Vietnamese, and that's how I see my friends write it although I don't deny that "ko phe" might be some bizarro jungle dialect.

Telephone = Ðiên thoai

Mango = Xoai

No = Không

Damn, I was all ready to pounce on this one, but you beat me to it! I'll throw in the few tidbits left to me.

Mango = xoài (not xoai)

Taxi = tác xi (should have a saucer-shaped thing between the a and the acute accent)

Ðiên thoai should also have some more diacriticals, but until we get real Unicode support, we can't type them in.

(How is it that an "attractive" polyglot Vietnamese has escaped my attention on this board for so long? I thought Opus was the only other Vietnamese speaker.)

[Collounsbury]

Originally posted by MEBuckner
The name of the Mande branch of the Niger-Congo language family in West Africa comes from the same source.


Eh, really? I thought this was place name derived.

[TheLoadedDog]

Originally posted by Greg Charles


(How is it that an "attractive" polyglot Vietnamese has escaped my attention on this board for so long? I thought Opus was the only other Vietnamese speaker.) [/B]

I've tried to learn that language for the last ten years. I've managed to pick up more Cantonese words (without making an attempt to learn) than Vietnamese. Man, it's one tough language.

I can swear in it though! :D

A quick question (possibly a stupid question, but I'm neither a linguist or a musician): Does the fact that Vietnamese is a tonal language make it more difficult to write song lyrics than in a non-tonal Western language?

[TheLoadedDog]

erm...that should be "neither...nor ". I rest my case about the linguist bit. D'uh. :o

[Greg Charles]

Originally posted by TheLoadedDog

A quick question (possibly a stupid question, but I'm neither a linguist or a musician): Does the fact that Vietnamese is a tonal language make it more difficult to write song lyrics than in a non-tonal Western language?

There are no stupid questions, just ones that are easier to ridicule! :)

It's a hard question to answer though, because you really need to find someone who speaks both languages fluently and composes song lyrics in both. From what I've seen, the music must follow the tones to some extent, but not entirely. On the other hand Vietnamese words are all one syllable so it's easier to fit them into a tune. I just don't have the experience to give you a better answer ... and in any case we've strayed pretty far from the OP!

[MEBuckner]

Originally posted by Collounsbury
Originally posted by MEBucknerThe name of the Mande branch of the Niger-Congo language family in West Africa comes from the same source.
Eh, really? I thought this was place name derived.
Mande -- Mandingo: ma-, "mother" + -nde, dimunitive suffix. See also Mandingo

Mandingo -- Mandingo: ma-, "mother" + -ndi, -nde, dimunitive suffix + -ngo, variant of -ko, suffix of nationality or tribe.

Or so saith the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

[Collounsbury]

Huh, interesting. Thanks.