Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jacobush 2744 days ago
They way English rifles through the pockets of other languages looking for vocabulary, just start using it and see if it sticks. :)
2 comments

Many languages do this as far as I can tell. I speak Indonesian and my girlfriend speaks Hindi, we come across words the languages share every so often. I’ll also catch a word in Tagalog or Dutch that I understand in Indonesian from time to time too.
My partner is Hungarian and her language and mine (I'm English) share very few words, it's strange with most languages I hear from other Europeans I can at least get one or two words fairly often but Hungarian is just straight Klingon.

It's an interesting hidtory, it basically shares no (known) common roots like most languages around Europe do.

that's just not truth, they have pretty much same international words for paprika, balcony, auto etc.
> They way English rifles through the pockets of other languages looking for vocabulary, just start using it and see if it sticks. :) reply

I do this in my native language (Dutch) as well. My favorite one I came up with is "search term scavenger hunt" in Dutch it is one word as "zoekwoordspeurtocht".