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What Words Can Be Interpreted In Many Other Languages

Why does the English language have so many words that are unknown to the majority of speakers?

There are a lot of words that are much more common in written works (fiction and nonfiction) than in the spoken language, partly to avoid monotony.If you're writing a piece of crime fiction, following your troubled-but-dedicated detective through a case and their investigative process, at a certain point you have to break out the thesaurus so you don't repeat the same nouns and adjectives all the fricking time.This is how you end up with words like "tumescent" being used to describe the distended belly of a rotting corpse. It's not technically INCORRECT (since the basic definition of "tumescence" is swelling), but in everyday life you would generally never hear that word spoken. You see it in written fiction, and most especially in erotic fiction to describe a man's nether swelling (in erotic situations where that swelling is pertinent to the story being told).But an unsuspecting English-language learner doesn't know this. They read the book, they think it's "an English word" (which it is, it's just a really uncommon one), and they try to use tumescence in conversation ... to hilarity or possibly strange reactions from the native speakers around them.Written English has a far greater vocabulary than most native speakers use in speaking on a daily basis. People fluent in English need to know the words so that they understand them when they come across them in writing, but one of the "tells" dividing native from non-native speakers is what subset of the total English vocabulary they use every day in speech.

What are the names of Peter in 10 different languages?

The following names can be interpreted as Peter in English:

* Albanian: Pjetër
* Amaric: P.et.ros
* Arabic: بطرس (Boutros)
* Armenian: Պետրոս (Bedros in Western dialect, Petros in Eastern dialect)
* Belarusian: Пётра (Piotra) and Пятро (Piatro)
* Bulgarian: Петър (Peter)
* Catalan: Pere
* Chinese: 彼得
* Cornish: Peder
* Czech: Petr
* Danish: Peter, Per, Peder
* Dutch: Peter, Pieter, Piet (Note: The Biblical Peter is translated as "Petrus".)
* Estonian: Peeter
* Finnish: Pietari, Pekka, Petri, Petteri
* French: Pierre (Note: True to the Greek, the word for stone in French is also "pierre")
* German: Peter (Note: The form "Peer" also occurs, albeit less commonly. The Biblical Peter is translated as "Petrus".)
* Greek: Πέτρος (Pronounced Petros)
* Hindi: Pathrus
* Hebrew : פטר (Peter)
* Hungarian: Péter
* Icelandic: Pétur
* Irish: Peadar
* Italian: Pietro, Piero
* Korean: 베드로 (Bedeuro; or, less commonly, 페트루스; Peteuruseu), 피터 (Piteo)
* Japanese: ピーター (Piitaa), and in Biblical contexts ペトロ (Petoro), ペテロ (Petero), or ペトロス (Petorosu)
* Latin: Petrus
* Latvian: Pēteris
* Maltese: Pietru
* Polish: Piotr, Piotrek (equivalent to Pete), Piotruś (diminutive)
* Portuguese: Pedro
* Romanian: Petru
* Russian: Пётр (Pyotr), Петя
* Scandinavian languages: Per, Pär, Peer (archaic), Peder, Petter, Peter
* Serbo-Croatian: Петар (Petar)
* Slovakian: Peter
* Spanish: Pedro
* Tamil: Raayappar (Note: Refers to biblical Peter, not a common name)
* Ukrainian: Петро (Petro)
* Welsh: Pedr

If Arabic is a language that can be interpreted in many ways, why do Muslims take the Quran so literally?

I think the question contains two assumptions that Arabic can be interpreted in many ways; and that Muslims take the Qur'an literally. Both are problematic assumptions to make. Incorrect assumption 1: Arabic can be interpreted in many waysWhat one finds -- in fact -- is that because of the morphological characteristics of Arabic (in particular, the number of variants of each word) allows for it to be more exact than many other languages. For example, consider the verse Surat Al-Baqarah 286:  لها ما كسبت وعليها ما اكتسبتwhich can be translated as "It gets every good that it earns, and it suffers every ill that it earns." But the words used are kasabat for the good deeds and iktasabat for the bad deeds -- both are variants on the root word ka-sa-ba (to earn). What's the difference? Kasaba means more like "gained" -- you got some good deeds, whether intentional or accidental. But iktasaba implies that you had the intention, you put effort in. In other words, this verse is an indication of Allah's mercy: even if you stumble into good, you shall be rewarded, but you shall only be punished if you deliberately do evil. That's how precise Arabic is. All languages have some ambiguity, but Arabic is more precise than most languages. The Qur'an is literally interpreted by MuslimsI think you are confusing two concepts. One is that Muslims believe the Qur'an is the literal word of God (which Muslims do believe). But that's different from saying they interpret every verse literally. Allah for example describes those who deliberately reject the message as being "deaf, dumb and blind" -- does this literally mean they are deaf, dumb and blind? Of course not, it is describing a kind of spiritual blindness. Of course there are rules for when non-literal interpretations can be applied. You can't say "you have been ordered to fast" and then you say "it doesn't mean that you literally have to fast -- it means a type of spiritual fasting only," then I'm going to ask you for some evidence to support the idea that that verse should be non-literally. Onus is on the person claiming a non-literal interpretation.

Are concepts that are interpreted through different languages synonymous to one another in each person's brain?

For me, unless the words are used sans context, es ist wunderlich.   I have heard of speakers of foreign languages interspersing English words like "ice cream"  and "weekend"  in phone calls with their parents,   and suspect this is quite common.And, of course, Spanglish is well-known, as are many other examples of using two or more languages basically at the same time. English, of course, does have the nice feature of borrowing from a great many languages, making such connections fairly easy,   so I could not speak for a person whose primary language is not Indo-European.

Translation of the word Money in different languages?

Albanian -> paraja
Arabic -> مال
Bengali -> অর্থ
Bulgarian -> пари
Czech -> peníze
Mandarin Chinese -> 貨幣
French -> la monnaie / l'argent
German -> Geld
Greek -> χρήμα
Dutch -> geld
Danish -> penge
Swedish -> pengar
Norwegian -> penger
Finnish -> raha
Estonian -> raha
Lithuanian -> pinigai
Latvian -> nauda
Polish -> pieniądz
Icelandic -> peningar
Italian -> denaro
Macedonian -> пари
Hungarian -> pénz
Croatian -> novac
Hebrew -> כסף
Portuguese -> dinheiro
Romanian -> bani
Serbian -> новац
Slovak -> peniaze
Slovenian -> denar
Farsi -> پول
Mongolian -> мөнгө
Korean -> 돈
Georgian -> ფული
Hindi -> पैसा
Japanese -> 貨幣
Kazakh -> ақша
Russian -> деньги
Vietnamese -> tiền
Turkish -> para
Tamil -> பணம்
Thai -> เงินตรา
Tagalog -> salapi

Why does the word mother in different languages commonly start with "m"?

The majority consensus is that the sound "mm" is one of the first sounds a baby makes while trying to speak, along with sounds of p, b,d and t.Since the mother is the primary caregiver, when a baby starts to speak, s/he is encouraged by the mother, and being boosted, baby starts to make that sound more often, and identifies the primary caregiver with that 'mm' sound. Mother also encourages the baby by pointing out the word for mother in that language, as mother wants to see the baby verbalizing her identity soon.  So you have mamma, mummy, maa etc.....and even words like amma/ammi is actually based on that mm sound. However, this article points out that in some languages the word for Mother and Father are different than we commonly presuppose: for example, in Fijian, the word for "mother" is nana, the Mongolian and Turkish word is ana, and in Old Japanese, the word for "mother" was papa. The modern Japanese word for "father," chichi, is from older titi. In Japanese the child's initial mamma is interpreted to mean "food".[6]Source: Mama and papa

Can different languages from Game of Thrones (for example Dothraki or Valyrian) be interpreted the same as real languages, or are they totally random words?

They are examples of what's called constructed languages. In the case of Game of Thrones, they were constructed by a linguist named David J. Peterson. I've attended events where he's talked about the construction of languages, and it's fascinating stuff. As for the procedure involved, he's provided with the scripts for each episode, with the dialog in English, and he returns the lines in the appropriate language, along with sound files for reference. (Source: Peterson, on a linguistics panel at WorldCon in Reno, NV, 2011). He’s also active and approachable on his twitter feed, username Dedalvs.For more information, I direct you to Michael Eyal Sharon's answer to Does the character of Drogo ad-lib the Dothraki language, or is it scripted?

In sign language Is there a different sign depending on the emotion you are trying to give for the same words?

Sometimes the hand motion of a lexical item in ASL can be the same, but depending on what you are trying to communicate, you facial expression can be entirely different. As an interpreter, if I were confronted with the same lexical item, but different facial expressions, I would interpret it different ways.For example, hand movements for SLEEP-PAST-MORNING would be the same, whether it was intentional or not, but your facial expression would be different depending on the circumstances, so I would be guided by the person’s facial expression, as well as the general tenor of the exchange, in choosing among expressions such as “sleep in,” “oversleep,” or slangier expressions, such as “crashed hard,” etc.There is another lexical item that usually gets glossed TERRIBLE. There are many different ways to execute this, and the range of meanings extends from “that’s unbelievable,” to “what gall!” to “I’m impressed by such boldness,” and even, “that was an awful thing that happened,” as a prelude to an expression of sympathy.When the asker says “different sign,” there’s a bit of a bias that there ought to be an ASL-English equivalency. There isn’t. It has nothing to do with emotion, though. There are times when the same lexical item in ASL means two different English words, that don’t seem to be very strongly related (the idiom “By the skin of my teeth,” and the word “budget” could be expressed by the same ASL word, executed with slightly different motion, and very different facial expressions), and other times when three or four ASL words can be interpreted by a single English words, and that’s just the way it is. It’s the same with any language. There’s never a word=word equivalency between two different languages.

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