Language topic

In my view, knowledge of Arabic can be extremely useful. My company is desperate for people who are fluent in Arabic and English and there are none. They have been recruiting for months and there's nobody good enough at both languages to do the job. It's the same with Japanese and Korean.
 
Yes, people who are fluent in Arabic are very sought after. The problem is that Arabic is a very hard language to learn properly, and not very many people have the stamina to do so. Even less are willing to take up a job as a translator or journalist, because by the time you are fluent Arabic, you have also received a high-profile education that qualifies you for a lot more. Most journalists who speak Arabic as a second language are the passionate type who live in countries like Syria or Iraq and put their lives on the line for the sake of informing the public.
 
Black Wizard said:
That's cool. Perun will now tell us why the Hungarians use an Indo-European word for "bear".
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I don't know very much about the history of Hungarian, but it is very unlikely that a language isolated from the other members of its family will retain all of its original vocabulary, especially if it has been surrounded almost exclusively by Slavic languages for many centuries. There is of course the possibility that the Magyars had already adopted the Slavic word when they invaded Europe in the 9th/10th centuries, but well, I don't know.

I can however, tell you why there are so many different words for bear in the Indo-European languages.
 
Well, there is a reason for that I happen to know. :p

Also, does anybody know how to contact users on imgur?
 
I like the way the whole continent uses "ananas" or something derived from that, except for the UK, which thought the thing was an apple. :p
 
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Hmm, I can't seem to be able to reach the user who uploaded the pics, which is a shame. So for those interested, the Kurdish word for 'church', dêr is related to Old Iranian *daiz-, meaning 'fortress' (ultimately from the Indo-European verb 'to besmear', 'to coat'. The word is contained in the Old Persian compound paridaida-, originally meaning 'enclosed area', later coming to mean 'hunting lodge', or 'park', and being adopted by the Greeks as paradeisos, hence English paradise.

Yeah, I'm having a party with those maps. :D
 
I emailed the link to my mother, who will probably find a million errors.

Forostar should produce a similar map of Middle-Earth in the First Age.
 
While I'm not an authority, from what I can see, those maps are actually pretty well-done and accurate.
 
Today I learnt that apart from Turks; Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians, Romanians also use variations of "Hassiktir" and "Siktir" in the same meaning as we do. It's something along the lines of "Fuck off" or "Oh fuck". Cool.
 
Ariana said:
I like the way the whole continent uses "ananas" or something derived from that, except for the UK, which thought the thing was an apple. :p
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I couldn't make out what you meant at first, thought you mean bananas or something. But it is funny, we call it "ananass".
 
The Flash said:
Today I learnt that apart from Turks; Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians, Romanians also use variations of "Hassiktir" and "Siktir" in the same meaning as we do. It's something along the lines of "Fuck off" or "Oh fuck". Cool.
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Actually, we only use Siktir and it's used quite humorously. It's generally considered outdated and you won't hear genuinely angry people using it. It's more like an interjection used to denote amazement or mild irritation.
Now that I think of it, I believe it may be possible that the former word has been misinterpreted as "(H)aj siktir", which we use as a short, colloquial variant of "(h)ajde".

What does "has" mean, by the way? I think we have it in a completely different phrase that many people use wrongly because they don't understand what it means. It would make sense if it's a borrowing.
 
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We use those words quite humorously as well. Has means "pure" in Turkish but I don't know if it's related to the word. I think it's because when you put more effect on the "S", the first letter of the word, it sounds like you're putting an "Ha" sound in as well.

We use "Hay" as an exclamation, it's probably a variant of "Haydi" like you guys.
 
Thanks, Flash, it makes sense indeed. The phrase can be loosely translated as "It's [has]", which is used in the sense of "obviously" or "of course". We don't have any word that sounds close and the phrase is grammatically awkward, so this is where it may have come from.
 
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