when i was really little, my babysitter only spoke spanish with me so i became bilingual but i never knew when i was speaking spanish or english. one time i told my mom i wanted an avocado & she understood but then when i said the same thing to my babysitter later that day, she burst into tears with laughter because i was saying “quiero abogado” which means “i want a lawyer.”
imagine a two year old repeatedly saying “i want a lawyer!” as an adult laughs at her.
Reminding me of also funny story: So my piano teacher of many years when I was a kid had a baby when I was in my teens. This little girl was super bright, and also bilingual in Mandarin and English from her first word.
I do not speak Mandarin. At all.
One day as I’m waiting for my mom to pick me up after the lesson, Baby Girl is playing in the kitchen and hears me sneeze! And she runs over and says, “You need [incomprehensible]?”
Now here’s the thing: I knew she was not speaking Mandarin. I don’t speak it, but my aunt and uncle both do, and a close family friend’s family growing up would code-switch quite comfortably around us. I was old enough and it was sufficiently different from English that because there was no formal teaching, I never derived anything from it? But I was very familiar with how it sounds to an uncomprehending ear.
What she said did not sound like Mandarin at all. It sounded like gibberish. Like English baby gibberish.
As I clearly didn’t understand, Baby Girl repeats, “You need [gibberish]!” and then, when I still don’t understand, she stamps her foot and makes Angry Noise at me, which attracts her mother’s attention.
Bewildered, I relate what’s going on. Her mother covers her face and says, “She wants to know if you want a kleenex.”
And then my piano teacher explained that Baby Girl had figured out that some people didn’t speak English and some people didn’t speak Mandarin and she needed to confine herself to one language around them.
But sometimes, as is very natural especially for quite young children, she’d run up against realizing she didn’t know the word for something – and sometimes she knew the word in one language, but not in the other!
And it seemed intuitive to her that the way to fix this was to say the word from the other language … with the right accent.
So what she’d been doing was taking the word for “tissue” or “kleenex” in Mandarin and saying it like an Anglophone would: no tone-change and different vowel shapes and all. And it made Baby Girl VERY FRUSTRATED when this did not solve the problem, and at that point she seemed to believe that the adults around her were being stupid on purpose.
Reminded again glancing at this jar on the counter, here’s another terminology difference I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to.
If someone had offered me a chocolate milkshake when I was little, and then handed me a glass of Nestlé Quik (as it was still branded)? I probably would have had a meltdown and not been given either thing for a while afterward. Just because it was far enough from what I was expecting.
And I still like chocolate milk well enough to have decided to try that store brand Nesquik knockoff, when I spotted some sweetened with Splenda. They’re both pretty good, but such different things to my mind that I can still find it startling to see flavored milk labeled as a milkshake after about 15 years of exposure 😅
(Even more of a surprise, if you’re expecting something else: the original sense, of an eggnog type concoction involving plenty of whiskey. Possibly not as freely handed out to kids, but you never know considering the time period. Call it a tonic…)
Again, not trying to go all prescriptivist. Other people are totally welcome to call it whatever they like, and likely get their own surprises eventually.
people often ask me if i as a bulgarian understand russian and i usually say yes, because i mostly do
sometimes im caught horribly off guard bc kOrmya in russian is probably the equivalent of kUHrmya in bulgarian (to breastfeed). bulgairan, however, ALSO has the word kOrmya. it means to gut someone.
is “chai” a TYPE of tea??! bc in Hindi/Urdu, the word chai just means tea
its like spicy cinnamon tea instead of bland gross black tea
I think the chai that me and all other Muslims that I know drink is just black tea
i mean i always thought chai was just another word for tea?? in russian chai is tea
why don’t white people just say tea
do they mean it’s that spicy cinnamon tea
why don’t they just call it “spicy cinnamon tea”
the spicy cinnamon one is actually masala chai specifically so like
there’s literally no reason to just say chai or chai
They don’t know better. To them “chai tea” IS that specific kind of like, creamy cinnamony tea. They think “chai” is an adjective describing “tea”.
What English sometimes does when it encounters words in other languages that it already has a word for is to use that word to refer to a specific type of that thing. It’s like distinguishing between what English speakers consider the prototype of the word in English from what we consider non-prototypical.
(Sidenote: prototype theory means that people think of the most prototypical instances of a thing before they think of weirder types. For example: list four kinds of birds to yourself right now. You probably started with local songbirds, which for me is robins, blue birds, cardinals, starlings. If I had you list three more, you might say pigeons or eagles or falcons. It would probably take you a while to get to penguins and emus and ducks, even though those are all birds too. A duck or a penguin, however, is not a prototypical bird.)
“Chai” means tea in Hindi-Urdu, but “chai tea” in English means “tea prepared like masala chai” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish “the kind of tea we make here” from “the kind of tea they make somewhere else”.
“Naan” may mean bread, but “naan bread” means specifically “bread prepared like this” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish between “bread made how we make it” and “bread how other people make it”.
We also sometimes say “liege lord” when talking about feudal homage, even though “liege” is just “lord” in French, or “flower blossom” to describe the part of the flower that opens, even though when “flower” was borrowed from French it meant the same thing as blossom.
We also do this with place names: “brea” means tar in Spanish, but when we came across a place where Spanish-speakers were like “there’s tar here”, we took that and said “Okay, here’s the La Brea tar pits”.
Or “Sahara”. Sahara already meant “giant desert,” but we call it the Sahara desert to distinguish it from other giant deserts, like the Gobi desert (Gobi also means desert btw).
Languages tend to use a lot of repetition to make sure that things are clear. English says “John walks”, and the -s on walks means “one person is doing this” even though we know “John” is one person. Spanish puts tense markers on every instance of a verb in a sentence, even when it’s abundantly clear that they all have the same tense (”ayer [yo] caminé por el parque y jugué tenis” even though “ayer” means yesterday and “yo” means I and the -é means “I in the past”). English apparently also likes to use semantic repetition, so that people know that “chai” is a type of tea and “naan” is a type of bread and “Sahara” is a desert. (I could also totally see someone labeling something, for instance, pan dulce sweetbread, even though “pan dulce” means “sweet bread”.)
Also, specifically with the chai/tea thing, many languages either use the Malay root and end up with a word that sounds like “tea” (like té in Spanish), or they use the Mandarin root and end up with a word that sounds like “chai” (like cha in Portuguese).
So, can we all stop making fun of this now?
Okay and I’m totally going to jump in here about tea because it’s cool. Ever wonder why some languages call tea “chai” or “cha” and others call it “tea” or “the”?
It literally all depends on which parts of China (or, more specifically, what Chinese) those cultures got their tea from, and who in turn they sold their tea to.
The Portuguese imported tea from the Southern provinces through Macau, so they called tea “cha” because in Cantonese it’s “cha”. The Dutch got tea from Fujian, where Min Chinese was more heavily spoken so it’s “thee” coming from “te”. And because the Dutch sold tea to so much of Europe, that proliferated the “te” pronunciation to France (”the”), English (”tea”) etc, even though the vast majority of Chinese people speak dialects that pronounce it “cha” (by which I mean Mandarin and Cantonese which accounts for a lot of the people who speak Chinese even though they aren’t the only dialects).
And “chai”/”chay” comes from the Persian pronunciation who got it from the Northern Chinese who then brought it all over Central Asia and became chai.
This is the post that would make Uncle Iroh join tumblr
Tea and linguistics. My two faves.
I love this
it’s not just english, that’s just how borrowings work in languages. the borrowed word typically undergoes specialization (like with chai) or broadening of meaning. i’d even risk saying that while being adapted to english chai went through a bit of a semantic shift, as its meaning moved from a type of drink to a combination of spices (chai latte etc). it was explained very nicely by the people above me. basically what i’m trying to say is don’t say people use chai as a modifier because they don’t know better, cause they use the word correctly within the context of the english language. alterations of meaning are natural adaptation processes that are unavoidable when speakers of different languages interact, especially if the borrowed words come from languages belonging to vastly different cultures and the speakers of the borrowing language need to adjust the original meaning to their contextual needs.
“La flemme”, short for “j’ai la flemme” (I have the flemme) roughly means the mental (and/or physical) incapacity of doing a generally simple task, of doing anything really, but also takes a slightly ironical acknowledgement of the link made between this incapacity and laziness, as the best way to translate would be “I’m too lazy/tired for this right now” even though the meaning actually covers a broader idea of discouragement and ennui.
THIS IS SO COOL. Like I knew that it was a thing, I just didn’t realize it was such a UNIQUE THING.
we actually have more than one, depending on the variety of english you speak! they mostly tend to be profanity for example, in australian and british english, another infix is “bloody” abso-bloody-lutely, mate
also, in hip hop slang, we have “iz” or “izn” like, shiznit for shit and “ma”, “whose location in the gives a word an ironic pseudo-sophistication, as insophistimacated, saxomaphone, and edumacation”
Honestly, as a German I can not quite understand the obsession of the English speaking world with the question whether a word exists or not. If you have to express something for which there is no word, you have to make a new one, preferably by combining well-known words, and in the very same moment it starts to exist. Agree?
Deutsche Freunde, could you please create for me a word for the extreme depression I feel when I bend down to pick up a piece of litter and discover two more pieces of litter?
um = around
die Welt = world
die Umwelt = environment
ver = prefix to indicate something difficult or negative, a change that leads to deterioration or even destruction that is difficult to reverse or to undo, or a strong negative change of the mental state of a person
der Müll = garbage, trash, rubbish, litter
-ung = -ing
die Vermüllung = littering
ver- = see before
zweifeln = to doubt
-ung = see before
die Verzweiflung = despair, exasperation, desperation
die Umweltvermüllungsverzweiflung = …
This is a german compound on the spot master class and I am LIVING
This is one of the reasons why I used to love studying German. I hope to go back to it some day…
THIS IS WHY GERMANS CHEAT ON THE WORD LIMIT AT INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITIES
Ooooooh! THIS is why we are not allowed to write our exams in German at international universities. Now I understand!
This is why German universities have a character limit on papers instead of a word limit!
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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