[ambulatorybird]

As someone who grew up in a Chinese-speaking household, I've noticed the same thing. E.g., lobster is "dragon shrimp," computer is "electric brain," etc. I wonder if the reason European languages have so many apparently 'unique' words is their inclusion of other older European languages such as Greek and Latin. Chinese, by comparison, seems to have borrowed mainly from itself.

[DrJokepu]

Yes, that's the exact reason. The words mentioned in the article all make total sense if you know Latin and/or Ancient Greek:

* bus (from omnibus, latin for "for everyone")

* shampoo - that's actually coming from the Hindi champo (according to Wikipedia, I didn't know it) where it means "head massage"

* isotope - that's actually Greek, but still not hard to figure out; iso = same, topos (τόπος) = place

* communism - that doesn't even need explanation

* computer - also no explanation needed

My point is, the only thing that makes these words sound "unique" is that they are usually borrowed from other languages, especially Latin or Ancient Greek. Many of these words are just as simply structured as their Chinese equivalents.

[sliverstorm]

The other thing that makes many of them sound unique is the way they are put together (conjugated?), which produces a new sound. To an unfamiliar ear, isotope and iso topos sound like different words.

[jerf]

If you'd like to dig more into this, the key word you are looking for is "etymology", the study of word origins and associated issues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology

If you look in dictionaries, especially the more complete ones, all words will have their etymologies spelled out. For instance, the etymology for etymology from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/etymology is:

Etymology: Middle English ethimologie, from Anglo-French, from Latin etymologia, from Greek, from etymon + -logia -logy

For pretty much every word you can think of in English, there's a locally-sensible etymology for it. English's problem is the attitude exemplified in the classic quote:

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James D. Nicoll http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-499.html

The problem isn't that we don't have roots in English; the problem is that we have three-ish major sets of them (Anglo-Saxon, Greek, Latin, though if you really dig those are all somewhat related too, for instance see m-w.com's entry for "fire"), and will freely borrow any others we need at will.

Of course the practical effect for a foreign learner is that it doesn't look like we have roots.

This is why spelling contests in English can actually be interesting. It is also why, at the higher levels of competition, the contestant always asks for the etymology of the word; it isn't just a play for time, though it is that, it is also a vital question! Spelling an Arabic-descended word like "falafel" with Greek phonetics might come out "phalaphel" and that's just embarrassing. (Compare with the phonetics, etymology, and spelling of "phosphor", with its two "ph"s.)

[barrkel]

I prefer http://www.etymonline.com/index.php - indeed, I have a keyword search in Firefox set up for just this. Also, see acre's etymology - also cognates in Sanskrit etc., but seemingly more direct than pyre etc.

[joubert]

Icelandic has some beautiful examples of creative language (purism), e.g. instead of using a word derived from the Greek for electricity, it uses "rafmagn" which literally means "amber power".

Another example is sími, the word for telephone (which comes from the greek "tele" (far) and "phone" (voice)).

[sethg]

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the man who more or less single-handedly revived the modern Hebrew language, spent a great deal of effort coming up with Hebrew words for modern things. “Telephone” was “sakh-rakhok”, from the classical Hebrew words for “conversation” and “far”. Not all of his suggestions took root: Israelis just call the telephone a “telefon”.

[Gormo]

There is a famous article called "Uncleftish Beholding", which is a summary of basic atomic theory, but written in an alternate "English" that uses only Germanic root words, replacing all words from Latin, Greek, etc: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding

[hugh3]

I was reading about this the other day, and the Arabic word for "electricity" (kahraba, apparently) is also based on the Arabic word for amber.

Chinese, on the other hand, just uses the word for "lightning". This might be a more logical choice, but it indicates that the Chinese didn't have a word for electricity until after it was discovered that lightning and electricity were actually the same thing, whereas Europeans had been using the word "electricity" since 1600ish and didn't prove the connection to lightning until the 1750s (though I assume it must have been suspected).

[chousuke]

Finns seem to like coining neologisms as well. The language is extremely productive, with every base word potentially yielding dozens of derivatives. There's even a national "language office" that tries to promote Finnish alternatives to foreign loans. Some fail to catch on, but many do.

For example, the word for telephone is "puhelin" which is derived from the verb for "to chat" using a postfix (-in) that indicates a tool of some kind.

Computers are literally "knowledge machines". The word for electricity is also interesting: It's "sähkö" which I guess derives from "sähinä", meaning buzz.

[jbarham]

FWIW before the introduction of electronic computers as we know them, "computer" was a job description (think of folks, usually women, who calculated tables for e.g. artillery).

[vorg]

And a non-human one was called a "computor", with -or at the end.

[sethg]

English is especially problematic in this regard, because modern English is a trainwreck between Anglo-Saxon, a Germanic language, and Norman French, a Romance language.

[CWuestefeld]

Except for more modern words. For example, the word(s) for email that my wife uses is a transliteration of the English sounds, resulting in something like "Ee-may-are".

Also, Chinese translations for non-Chinese places and people are frequently impossible to decipher. My wife frequently looks up from her Chinese news paper and says "this article talks about a person named 'blah blah'; who do you think it is?". Americans sometimes insensitively change foreign terms (e.g., "Beijing" becomes "Peking"; "Torino" becomes "Turin"). But the Chinese system absolutely forces them to do this, because of the limited set of syllables the can write. In Mandarin, the only consonant sound you can have at the end of a syllable is "n" or "ng", so if you need a sound other than that you've got to either drop it or add in an extra syllable having that consonant at its beginning.

[johkra]

German for instance, uses Peking and Turin, too.

I don't know about Peking, but Turin is actually the name in the local dialect. Torino is proper Italian. [1] My guess is that Turin is the older name which got established in the English and German language and it was later changed to the proper Italian name Torino.

[1] Both mean "bull" in English, there was something about bull (taur...) already in the name when it was founded by the romans.

[hugh3]

Americans sometimes insensitively change foreign terms (e.g., "Beijing" becomes "Peking"; "Torino" becomes "Turin").

For what it's worth, Peking and Turin were both fixed in the English language long before there was an America. And if the Italians want to complain about the "insensitive" Anglicisations of their city names they can go complain to Elisabetta II herself in Londra, Inghilterra.