Well, it’s not too far away, is it?
I wonder if the Danish/Dutch dictionary, or the reverse, makes a passing reference to the similarity of these terms.
You feel your pronunciation might be a bit dodgy then? 
Is that a real concept, though? In American, I might say “I want a cookie”, and I’d be happy if I got an Oreo or a chocolate chip cookie or a Thin Mint, so “cookie” is a reasonable category. But would a Brit ever say “I want a biscuit”, and not care whether it was a sweet or a savory one? Really, is there any situation where someone would want to communicate the concept “a thing which is either a cookie or a cracker”?
Cracker in the sense of a crisp baked good dates from 1739, and originated in the UK. Cookie did indeed enter British English via North America, however.
“Where’s the biscuit section in this supermarket?”
**American English has no word for … **
…a non-pedigreed cat; a feline mutt.
We will adopt the word “moggie” if I have anything to say about it. And I am going to say something about it. (See Evil Overlord thread in MPSIMS).
I just checked in my OED, and apparently “cookie” was originally Scottish English.
Over there, just past the water biscuits.
When my brother was engaged, his fiancée’s brother’s wife’s mother told my mom, “When Theo and Jen get married, there’s a word in Yiddish for what I’ll be to you!” (It turns out she was slightly exaggerating, but there is a word in Yiddish for your kid’s in-laws.)
Similarly, in Spanish, the original meaning of the words compadre and comadre is “godparents of your children or parents of your godchildren,” with the meaning “very close friend” being because that’s who you would ask to be your kid’s godparents. As I understand it, that was the original meaning of the word gossip in English, which began life as godsib, i.e. god-sibling, with the semantic shift of very close friend -> idle conversation. Analogously, the French word for gossip is commérage, from commère (the etymological equivalent of comadre).
Anyway, one fun thing is Québécois French’s tendency to borrow English words and give them meanings that not only don’t the words have, but we don’t even have words for at all. Three examples are nowhere (as in partir s’un nowhere), meaning a random road trip with no plan of where you’re going to end up; destroy (j’me sentais tellement destroy), meaning completely drained, wasted, or physically, emotionally, or morally exhausted; and design (c’est très design), meaning attractive/chic because well and trendily designed, such as an interior with lots of chocolate wood or whatever.
I usually say “coolth”. I think I got that here, years ago.
We have no single word to distinguish maternal and paternal uncles and aunts. Neither do we have a good crop of words to deal with polygamous marriages. Arabic needs (and has) such words.
Kin terms are an entire field of linguistic-cum-anthropological study. There are several different systems depending on whether your blood relations on your father’s or mother’s side are regarded as your relatives based on their gender, birth order, collaterality (in some languages cousins may or may not be the same as siblings), etc.
One system names different structures as follows:
The terms used in most European languages and societies, such as English-speaking ones, are called “Eskimo kinship structure”:
However, even some European languages make distinctions that English doesn’t, and vice-versa. For example, Swedish has different words for paternal and maternal grandmother: *farmor *and mormor (and likewise for grandfathers). Contrariwise, modern French doesn’t make a distinction between steps and in-laws – both are beau-/belle-: a stepmother and a mother-in-law are both belle-mère (although there are terms that mean son-in-law and daughter-in-law, gendre and bru, and an old-fashioned insulting term for a stepmother, marâtre – think Cinderella).
Me too - that feeling I get when I wake up at three in the morning and think about someone I still think fondly of, but that I’ll never see again, and the feeling both warms me and chills me simultaneously.
Yep. Japanese has very little in the way of pronunciation surprises, or inflection.
There’s a question: Why is that kinship structure called “Eskimo”? I mean, sure, it’s the system used by the Eskimos (at least, so I would presume), but it’s also used by a lot of other languages. And I’d expect that the linguists who named the categories were a lot more likely to be speakers of European languages than of Eskimo. So why do we say that Europeans use an Eskimo kinship structure, instead of saying that Eskimos use a European kinship structure?
This system originated in the 19th century, so my hazarded guess is that anthropologists in that period liked to think of themselves as studying and elucidating the quirks of “exotic, primitive” cultures rather than seeing their own culture as a mere object of study. But I dunno.
The Maori term whanau is loosely translated as “family” but it includes extended relatives and close family friends, and a greater cohesion than the term in English, if that makes sense.
America has that word - Hicadoola!
Well, we have ‘spicy’. That seems to work.
Something we don’t have is word meaning ‘to be hit by dozens of bees fired from the mouth of a robot’. And we (or, rather, you) will need such a word, as soon as I get that reactor running.
Curious. The online etymology dictionary has it as of Dutch origin via North America.
We no longer have a word for what “gay” used to mean. It did NOT mean “happy.” It meant something like light and frivolous and carefree, but beyond what those words mean. Butterflies were gay. A lady’s hat with a big feather or flower in it was gay. Children skipping through a meadow were gay.
We no longer have a word for that.