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Nearly every word in every Uralic language pertaining to a tech level past the stone age is a loan word.


Japanese too. Once you get past the alphabet being different, there are an enormous number of loan words (mostly from English). I bet walking around Tokyo you could read half the signs if you spent a couple of days just learning katakana.


I was reading some Japanese sentence and I stumbled upon word "tsuitaa" which I knew had to be English loan word. I kept reading it aloud over and over in hope that I would figure it out. I didn't so I finally gave up and moved on, the next word was "feisubukku" which was easy and it made me immediately realize what the "tsuitaa" was.


God yeah, sometimes I'll read the katakana and sit there for 10 minutes trying to figure out what the damned English is, pronouncing it a hundred different ways until it finally clicks.


What is it?


"feisubukku" is Facebook so we are talking about web pages. Facebook and Tsuitaa are 2 social media sites.


"tsuitaa" = Twitter


Portuguese too. Most words related to christianity (and a few others too, like カボチャ or ボタン) were introduced in the 15th century by portuguese jesuits.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_words_of_Po...


And don’t forget all the Sino-Japanese loanwords (kango, 漢語), which has made up a huge chunk of the vocabulary for centuries, long before the current influx of English loanwords.


It's interesting that whereas old kango are Chinese loanwords, many newer ones are made-up words, and some even got backported into the Chinese language!


The newer words were usually made up to explain Western philosophical and scientific concepts. A lot of this work was done in an academic context, so whoever came up with an appropriate translation first got to be cited by everyone else.


"there are an enormous number of loan words (mostly from English)."

Actually, no. Most of the loan words are from Chinese, if you look at the full vocabulary of Japanese. Old Chinese. It's a huge part of the Japanese vocabulary. Then you have a lot of loan words (from later times) from Portuguese, Dutch, and even German. And English. But even words like the word for beer (ビール), which sounds something like "beer-oo" isn't from English. It's from Dutch "bier".

In any case, the modern loan words are nearly always written in katakana, while loan words from traditional Chinese aren't. You don't see them as easily, while you can quickly spot modern loan words and there aren't _that_ many. Even though new loan words tend to come more from English nowadays.


The word for copper is a native uralic word and thus it's hypothesized that the uralic speakers unlocked the bronze age independently.


Native copper could be found pretty readily in prehistory


Számítógép?


https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/g%C3%A9pely

Also there are many cases when a word is just a calque. Like vízfej. I wouldn’t call this a Hungarian word in the strictest sense, because it exists only because of other languages, even when víz and fej are Hungarian words. It clearly comes from German, or maybe Latin, or even Greek.


That pre-dates IT revolution. I seen Hungarians using quite a lot of loanwords too.




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