Last word you learned in a foreign language

A forum dedicated to the studying of natural languages and for discussions in languages other than English.
ThatAnalysisGuy
hieroglyphic
hieroglyphic
Posts: 28
Joined: 01 Mar 2018 00:09

Re: Last word you learned in a foreign language

Post by ThatAnalysisGuy »

I learned two new words in Esperanto: "sekvinbero," meaning raisin, and "flosglacio," meaning sea ice. I also learned a new noun in German, "Angriff," meaning attack.
Native: English ( :usa: )
B1: :epo:
User avatar
Arayaz
mayan
mayan
Posts: 1850
Joined: 07 Sep 2022 00:24
Location: Just south of the pin-pen merger
Contact:

Re: Last word you learned in a foreign language

Post by Arayaz »

:bra: Portuguese esquecer (v.) to forget
my thread
arayaz.neocities.org

soldier koi, made of grain, now an empty dell...

proud member of the myopic-trans-southerner-viossa-girl-with-two-cats-who-joined-on-september-6th-2022 gang
User avatar
Arayaz
mayan
mayan
Posts: 1850
Joined: 07 Sep 2022 00:24
Location: Just south of the pin-pen merger
Contact:

Re: Last word you learned in a foreign language

Post by Arayaz »

:bra: Portuguese bacalhão lit. "cod," but also an insult meaning "clumsy, lazy, of little intelligence / who doesn't know what to say."
:irl: Irish iontach "wonderful"
:idn: Indonesian kecap "soy sauce" (very confusing, as it looks and sounds like "ketchup"
my thread
arayaz.neocities.org

soldier koi, made of grain, now an empty dell...

proud member of the myopic-trans-southerner-viossa-girl-with-two-cats-who-joined-on-september-6th-2022 gang
User avatar
Fluffy8x
cuneiform
cuneiform
Posts: 82
Joined: 28 Apr 2014 06:38
Contact:

Re: Last word you learned in a foreign language

Post by Fluffy8x »

:wls: Welsh defaid sheep (plural). Just learned this after knowing the singular form (dafad) for a long time.
The creator of ŋarâþ crîþ v9.
User avatar
Acipencer
sinic
sinic
Posts: 347
Joined: 27 Jun 2021 08:39
Location: Somewhere

Re: Last word you learned in a foreign language

Post by Acipencer »

:hun: hagyma, onion
zyma
korean
korean
Posts: 10589
Joined: 12 Jul 2013 23:09
Location: UTC-05:00

Re: Last word you learned in a foreign language

Post by zyma »

:esp: columpio (n.) "swing"

If I understand correctly, it means "swing" as in the type of hanging seat one might find at a playground, for instance.
The user formerly known as "shimobaatar".
(she)
Salmoneus
MVP
MVP
Posts: 3117
Joined: 19 Sep 2011 19:37

Re: Last word you learned in a foreign language

Post by Salmoneus »

Üdj wrote: 08 Jul 2023 21:12
:idn: Indonesian kecap "soy sauce" (very confusing, as it looks and sounds like "ketchup"
Looks, sounds, and is of course ultimately the same word - as is even clearer when you consider obsolete spellings like 'ketjap' and 'catsup'.

Ironically, both America and Indonesia have distorted the original meaning, which was garum (fish sauce). In Europe, this was supplemented with mushrooms. Later, people experimented adding tomatoes, took out the mushrooms, and eventually even took out the fish.

(many people partcularly associate 'ketchup' with tomato ketchup, but you can still buy other forms, and tomato ketchup usually still has 'tomato ketchup' written on it to disambiguate as a result).
User avatar
Arayaz
mayan
mayan
Posts: 1850
Joined: 07 Sep 2022 00:24
Location: Just south of the pin-pen merger
Contact:

Re: Last word you learned in a foreign language

Post by Arayaz »

Salmoneus wrote: 11 Jul 2023 20:59
Üdj wrote: 08 Jul 2023 21:12
:idn: Indonesian kecap "soy sauce" (very confusing, as it looks and sounds like "ketchup"
Looks, sounds, and is of course ultimately the same word - as is even clearer when you consider obsolete spellings like 'ketjap' and 'catsup'.

Ironically, both America and Indonesia have distorted the original meaning, which was garum (fish sauce). In Europe, this was supplemented with mushrooms. Later, people experimented adding tomatoes, took out the mushrooms, and eventually even took out the fish.

(many people partcularly associate 'ketchup' with tomato ketchup, but you can still buy other forms, and tomato ketchup usually still has 'tomato ketchup' written on it to disambiguate as a result).
Thank you! This makes more sense than it just being a coincidence, too :)
my thread
arayaz.neocities.org

soldier koi, made of grain, now an empty dell...

proud member of the myopic-trans-southerner-viossa-girl-with-two-cats-who-joined-on-september-6th-2022 gang
Kovora
rupestrian
rupestrian
Posts: 4
Joined: 13 Jul 2023 06:54

Re: Last word you learned in a foreign language

Post by Kovora »

Finnish: maitoo - milk
User avatar
Arayaz
mayan
mayan
Posts: 1850
Joined: 07 Sep 2022 00:24
Location: Just south of the pin-pen merger
Contact:

Re: Last word you learned in a foreign language

Post by Arayaz »

:bra: Portuguese frear "to brake"
:idn: Indonesian bisa "to be able to"
:irl: Irish lón "lunch"
my thread
arayaz.neocities.org

soldier koi, made of grain, now an empty dell...

proud member of the myopic-trans-southerner-viossa-girl-with-two-cats-who-joined-on-september-6th-2022 gang
User avatar
eldin raigmore
korean
korean
Posts: 6383
Joined: 14 Aug 2010 19:38
Location: SouthEast Michigan

Re: Last word you learned in a foreign language

Post by eldin raigmore »

Piphilology.
I learned it from Sandi Toksvig’s QI. So, maybe it’s English?
It refers to the habit or custom or hobby of making up word-strings as mnemonics for the decimal expansion of the dimensionless constant pi, which is the ratio of a Euclidean circle’s circumference to its diameter.
(Such a mnemonic is called a piem. Piphilology is the philology of piems.)
Each word has as many letters as the corresponding digit of pi.
This would work in any language written with an alphabet and using a decimal system of numerals;
though it might vary if spelling were inconsistent!
Example:
“How I wish I could calculate pi” decodes to 3(.)141592
Last edited by eldin raigmore on 27 Nov 2023 04:39, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Arayaz
mayan
mayan
Posts: 1850
Joined: 07 Sep 2022 00:24
Location: Just south of the pin-pen merger
Contact:

Re: Last word you learned in a foreign language

Post by Arayaz »

eldin raigmore wrote: 05 Nov 2023 06:36 “How I wish I could calculate pi” decodes to 3(.)141592
Brilliant.

Also: :bra: Portuguese estação = "season" and "station"
my thread
arayaz.neocities.org

soldier koi, made of grain, now an empty dell...

proud member of the myopic-trans-southerner-viossa-girl-with-two-cats-who-joined-on-september-6th-2022 gang
ThatAnalysisGuy
hieroglyphic
hieroglyphic
Posts: 28
Joined: 01 Mar 2018 00:09

Re: Last word you learned in a foreign language

Post by ThatAnalysisGuy »

:isl: Icelandic ör "arrow"

I learned that word by searching the etymology of English word arrow. I also learned the Gothic word arhwazna from this.
Native: English ( :usa: )
B1: :epo:
User avatar
lsd
roman
roman
Posts: 878
Joined: 11 Mar 2011 21:11

Re: Last word you learned in a foreign language

Post by lsd »

unfortunately, mamad, an acronym for merhav mugan dirati,
an obligatory strong room in new housing in Israel...
Visions1
roman
roman
Posts: 1189
Joined: 27 Jul 2021 08:05

Re: Last word you learned in a foreign language

Post by Visions1 »

/tɬʼp/ to cut with scissors - Nuxalk
At work. Will be back.
User avatar
LinguistCat
sinic
sinic
Posts: 361
Joined: 06 May 2017 07:48

Re: Last word you learned in a foreign language

Post by LinguistCat »

:jpn: ( パンの )耳 - heel (of bread) lit: bread ears
Glenn
hieroglyphic
hieroglyphic
Posts: 60
Joined: 07 Jun 2017 07:56

Re: Last word you learned in a foreign language

Post by Glenn »

(I wrote a post for this thread earlier, then deleted it accidentally; I am hoping for better luck this time…)

One word I recently encountered for the first time was Russian перипетия peripetiya, “a sudden twist or reversal.” The example given in Wiktionary is перипети́и жи́зни perepetii zhizni “the twists and turns of life”; the usage in the original text I read was not exactly the same, but something similar. (I subsequently learned that the same term exists in English as well, as “peripeteia,” ultimately from Greek περιπέτεια.)

Another Russian term that temporarily threw me for a loop is ври́о vrio, which turned out to be short for вре́менно исполня́ющий/исполня́ющая обя́занности vremenno ispolnyayushchii (m.)/ispolnyayushchaya (f.) obyazannosti “temporarily fulfilling the responsibilities (of)”, a phrase I had already encountered before. The English equivalent would be “acting,” as in “the acting director”; whereas in English, the word cannot be used without including the position (* “the acting said…”), I’m pretty sure that I saw ври́о used on its own.

I work for an American facility of a French company, and quite a few of our E-mails and online resources are bilingual in French and English or translated from French into English. At the bottom of some of these E-mail was a line beginning with Réunion, which my brain automatically connected with the island of Réunion, especially since it was capitalized; I finally realized that it was in fact réunion “meeting” (e.g., “Réunion Microsoft Teams” = “Microsoft Teams meeting). Along similar lines, there is a particular technical abbreviation frequently used at my workplace, and I could not figure out what it stood for, until I discovered that it was an abbreviation of a French phrase, not an English one. (Most of the staff just use the abbreviation, without worrying about what it stands for.)

On a final note, my wife and I recently tried switching the voice on our GPS driving app from English to Russian, since our Russian is rusty. We both spent time living in Russia (and in my case, Kazakhstan as well) many years ago; however, since neither of us owned a car there, we never had much cause to learn terms specific to driving. We’ve already picked up a few (e.g., the GPS used the phrase две полосы справа dve polosy cprava for “the two right lanes.”)

(My apologies for the length of this post, and the perhaps-idiosyncratic transcription of the Russian above.)
User avatar
Dormouse559
moderator
moderator
Posts: 2973
Joined: 10 Nov 2012 20:52
Location: California

Re: Last word you learned in a foreign language

Post by Dormouse559 »

:fra: embourgeoisement /ɑ̃buʁʒwazmɑ̃/ nm - gentrification
France Culture wrote:Louis Ligabue, tapissier dans le 14e, a alors 37 ans et il note déjà l’embourgeoisement de son quartier.
Louis Ligabue, an upholsterer in the 14th arrondissement, was 37 years old at the time, and he was already noticing the gentrification of his neighborhood.
What a fun word! [:D] It follows French spelling rules quite closely, and the derivation is intuitive, yet the result looks so ornamented.
Akubra
cuneiform
cuneiform
Posts: 136
Joined: 24 May 2024 20:33
Location: Where "amai", "plezant", and "goesting" are ordinary words.

Re: Last word you learned in a foreign language

Post by Akubra »

:nld: :vls: ontprikkelen /ɔntprɪkələ(n)/: destimulate, remove someone from an overly stimulating environment
A word used in the psychiatric department of the hospital where my wife works.
:con: Rautahi, K'aach
Visions1
roman
roman
Posts: 1189
Joined: 27 Jul 2021 08:05

Re: Last word you learned in a foreign language

Post by Visions1 »

Eastern Aramaic: kafrisin - caper flowers
At work. Will be back.
Post Reply