• 6 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • to me what is really surprising is that some languages found it necessary to use two words to describe what is essentially the same fucking shit.

    I mean, you can start calling all sorts of body parts the same shit, and some of them even have words already. Like we say arms and legs, but we could also say upper and lower limbs. We’ve got knees and elbows and shoulders, but they’re all just joints.

    Now I’m wondering what languages have the fewest words that could describe the entire body, as in once you break down the word “body” into any number of parts (without using the word “body”, like upper and lower body), how many other words are needed? I think in English you couldn’t get away with anything less than head, neck, torso, and extremities (although one might argue that the latter refers only to hands and feet so you’d have to put limbs back in as well).



  • This probably came from a country with transliterations that don’t line up very well in English. Like Japanese doesn’t have an English r, so one of the ways they do it is to elongate a vowel and alarm would become alaamu. But sometimes they have a long vowel with no r, like smoke is sumo-oku.

    When they go to write in English it’s not clear whether that long vowel represents an r or not, and they chose to add it in smoke and drop it in alarm. I still run across a smorking room from time to time.