#too many languages

[wannablegendary]

Okay uhh- just tell it george from the bridge

@jellyfish-enthousiast

[apprentissagesse]

I know I'm struggling when I start eyeing a new language to learn.

[my-skull-is-full-of-sunken-ships]

Since in east-slavic languages the word "computer" is just exactly the same word, but written in cyrillic (компьютер), I thought that all european languages (or maybe not only them) use this exact word (and French is just being a weirdo with it's "ordinateur")

But it turned out that in czech computer is "počítač" and in slovenian it's "računalnik", and half of european languages were probably too lazy to come up with their own name.

I started to google and here's what I found out:

Most languages (and not only european btw) indeed use the word "computer": german computer, portuguese computador, ukrainian комп'ютер, bulgarian компютър, polish komputer, hindi कंप्यूटर (kampyūṭar), albanian kompjuter, arabic كمبيوتر (kambyūtar), azerbaijani kompüter, thai คอมพิวเตอร์ (kompiwdter), japanese コンピュータ (kompyūta), korean 컴퓨터 (keompyuteo)

But there are lots of languages, which created their own name out of words "count", "compute", "calculate" etc. Here we have another arabic word حاسوب (ḥāsūb; along with كمبيوتر, kambyūtar) comes from the verb حسب (ḥasaba) "to count". Estonian verb "arvutama" makes "arvuti". Hungarian "számítógép" is basically "számít", to count, plus "gép", machine. Slovenian and czech words are also in this group of languages.

There're also groups of languages, where the word "computer" came whether from words like "arrange", "systematize" (french, spanish, armenian), or where computer basically means "data"+"machine" (norwegian, finnish)

And chineese and hawaiian made computer out of words "brain" and "electricity"

Fun fact: in russian laptop is called "notebook" (ноутбук), and I still can remember the amount of frustration back when I was, like, 7 y.o. when I found out that ноутбук and notebook are not the same thing.

[esnebeltamrandderwelt]

me: what is the english word for "blutegel"? should I look it u-

my shit brain: blood eagle

[illbeanisland]

My brain literally had an error when David said “Ich bin hier (I’m here)” instead of  “je suis la”, until it caught up on itself and told me that David speaks German, not French.. 🙂 

[eat-breathe-succeed]

21/08/17 In an attempt to salvage my productivity this summer, I’ve have a pretty good morning - put some stuff on GitHub, and started setting up a bullet journal to try and keep me occupied and organised next year.

[wannablegendary]

When you speak like 20 languages so you start failing at ur mother tongue

[my-skull-is-full-of-sunken-ships]

I think Germany has the biggest number of different names in different languages. I mean, take several popular european languages, and in every one of them the name of this country would be completely different from all the others.

We have Deutschland in german, Allemagne in french, Saksa in finnish, Germania in italian, Německo in czech, Vokietija in lithuanian and Tyskland in norwegian.

This is so crazy that I started to google things. Turns out, most of the variations came from different tribes, who lived there in the old times. This is how it goes:

Deutsch - from the Old High German "diutisc", which means 'folk', 'people'.

French Allemagne reference to the tribe of Alemanni.

Finnish Saksa - to Saxons.

Vokietija is basically from 'Volk' - 'folk'.

There are two versions of the word's Germania etymology. The first one is about Romans, who named Germanus a local tribe that they could not conquer. The second one says that this is Gallic word that means 'neighbour' or 'noisy'.

In slavic languages tho nobody cared about different tribes, as in pro-slavic language nĕmьcь just means 'foreigner' (how come that nobody else got this name is a mystery).