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Lost in translation
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2026
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One nice thing about English, it will lexical borrow from you in an instant.
We just love new ways to say old boring stuff.
Sometimes it gets so ingrained into English that it feels natural.
好久不见 (hǎo jiǔ bu jiàn), lit. long time no see, it's originally a Chinese phrase that became commonplace in English. Even though it doesn't quite hold up grammatically in English, no one will question it.
Are you telling me nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen... linguistically?
Ironically, same with Japanese. They have an entire alphabet dedicated to foreign words, Katakana. You want a hamburger and a beer? That's a "ハンバーガーとビール" (Hanbāgā to Biru). Coffee from Starbucks on your way to work? That's a "ドライブスルーコーヒー" (Doraibusurūkohi - a drive-thru coffee). Better fried chicken than anyone has a right to can be found at the "コンビニ" (Konbini - aka the convenience store). Learning Japanese it's rife with these borrowed words. Half the time it's "you're fucking kidding." The other half the time it's learning some insane formalism that makes saying "thank you" take five minutes.
What's cool is how English then adds those loanwords or portmanteau back into its lexicon like karaoke or, as I'm seeing more recently, egg sando. I really love how languages do that.
Reminder English will happily mug other languages for words, if they are handing new ones out for free? It's gonna take that new word and run with it.
Ya Katakana was actually super intuitive if you could recognize and pronounce the symbols. I was amazed at how well I got along there with basically just the alphabet lmaoo.
Awhile back, I watched an anime about camping. It was chill, and cute, and I enjoyed it. But every time they stopped to discuss some kind of camping equipment, it was all English loan words, and it drove me a bit bonkers.
What do you mean Japanese just straight up borrowed the phrase "ground tarp" from English??? Surely they already have words for that!
I'm learning Korean, in South Korea they use so much English vocabulary and it's all spelled phonetically, for example table (yes they use that word) becomes 테이블 (teibeul) and then you have to pronounce it like a Korean word which always sounds a little weird. Japanese is similar, but the possible syllables in Japanese are much more limited so it ends up sounding even weirder and sometimes isn't immediately recognisable as English.
They may have. Several Japanese words for everyday objects are taken from other languages despite having earlier words for those things. E.g. bread is pan (from Portuguese) and ball is boru (English).
Though my personal favorite is black hole. Despite having different words for black and hole, black hole is translated as burakkuhoru
One of my favorite Dogen videos, about how many loanwords can sound normal in a conversation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW4AiEqKGto
He had another one I think recently about a dentist who kept dropping random English words in sentences while talking with Dogen but he had katakana pronunciation so it was basically impossible to understand (one example was he threw in the word "jaw" but said "jō" instead).
It's a syllabary.
I have been saying it for years, English is a very informal and open language, have fun with it. Sky water is not technically a wrong way to refer to rain, liquid laundry soup is absolutely a sauce for your laundry, dish bricks, day star, the list goes on
I think this is one of the reasons why English (or it's descendants) will forever be the international language of trade. If it's not your first language, it's damn difficult to make yourself sound like a native speaker, but it's damn easy to make yourself understood.
I think you're confusing a reasonably short period in recent history with "forever".
In History there were quite a lot of "international languages of trade" other than English. It seems to depend very much on which nations were the top empire of the age and because the last two top empires were English-speaking countries (first Britain, then after that the United States), the English language has been dominant as a second language for a over a century now, but before that the English language already existed in a form very similar to the modern form and yet it wasn't at all an "international language of trade" (in fact, at least in Europe, before English it was French that was the dominant language of trade).
I bet that the next "international language of trade" will be Chinese.
By saying forever they're talking about the future, not the past.
A forecast not backed by anything other than wishful thinking and which runs counter everything that has always happened.
Claiming that English will forever be the "international language of trade" is like putting up a statue and under it the message: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!""
More in general, nothing lasts forever.
You can't really look at past examples now that globalization is a thing. An ubiquitous language wasn't really possible before then.
You see, I don't even have to show any evidence of anything, it's those who are claiming that "This time is different" and that this specific trading language, right now specifically (by an amazing coincidence, right when they live and make said claim, never before and - given that claim being "forever" and "global" - logically never again for a different one) will, unlike all trade languages before hold that position and endure, not just 100 years, not just 1000 years, but "forever".
Such a huge, massive, gigantic forecast needs equally huge, massive, gigantic proof.
So far, against that theory we have History, not just of trading languages but of languages themselves and nations showing that until none of those things lasts forever. On the side in favor of it we have ... *crickets*
That whole forecast stinks of jingoism and ignorance.
Words ordering with grammar can be unimportant to being known.
I remember an interview with Lisa Kudrow in which she described her French boyfriend's failure to remember the English word for toes, and said they were foot fingers.
English: if the people you're talking to understand what you're saying, you're ok. Even if the people you're talking to don't understand what you're saying, you're still ok. Just be fancy with your words, and everyone will like it.
In french, that's really the name that is given to them, colloquially : doigts de pied (foot fingers)
The real term is orteils (toes)
In Québec, we don't say that and I didn't even know French people say that.
They're really good at it, too. Sometimes it's even charming. For example, potatoes are "earth apples."
It's the same in Dutch - "aardapple" - but using the Dutch words for earth and apple rather than the French ones.
And don't get me started on French numbering - for example 98 is "four twenties eigtheen".
One doesn't get it for one's own language because all the weird stuff is "normal" but when you're learning other languages you discovered they're all riddled with funny constructs like this (and then there are expressions, which are often hilarious - for example on of the Dutch expression for wasting time on small details literally translates to "fucking ants")
I wonder if the meaning of pomme was broader in Old French, like how meat (from mete) used to mean food in Old English.
Yes it was the case, broadly pomme meant fruit.
Originally tomatoes were called pommes d'amour. There is pommes de terre (potatoes) pommes de pin (pinecones). If we would translate literally pomme de pin it would give us pineapple.
There were also other fruits beginning with pomme originally but I can't seem to recall them.
I vaguely heard that ‘berry’ and iirc ‘apple’ were used the same way in English, one for small fruits and the other for larger ones.
I knew someone who used the term "bird leaves" which I find hilarious.
Laundry soup, yumm
I love the silly things we say!
They mean a slightly different way
but still connect to things I know
and make the silly language grow.