You might wonder why the word of the day is so simple, it is an attempt to build an understanding of other languages. I figure that with a word a day, I might understand a dozen different words in written form… The first word was “Sun“, a basic word and many languages less than 4 characters. Yesterdays word was “Beer“, also pretty basic - the Swahili “Bia” is from english anyway.
I was going to go with Coffee today, which is as important to me as Beer; but I hardly ever get a coffee, often a “Flat White” or an “espresso macchiato” or a “café au lait“. My choice differs more by region and café than language, so better to wait till I start some phrases. Today, is Water.
Language |
Word |
Water |
Arabic |
العربيه |
الماء |
Chinese (Simplified) |
中文（简体） |
水 |
Dutch |
Nederlands |
water |
French |
Français |
eau |
German |
Deutsch |
wasser |
Hebrew |
עברית |
מים |
Hindi |
हिन्दी |
पानी |
Japanese |
日本語 |
水 |
Russian |
Русский |
вода |
Spanish |
Español |
agua |
Swahili |
Kiswahili |
maji |
The symbol for Japanese, simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese is “水”. Perhaps I should also add Korean or Thai into the mix, though Japanese characters can be very different to Chinese; I guess Sun and Water a pretty core and would have been part of the initial character set that the Japanese borrowed from. Beer on the other hand is “ビール” in Japanese and “啤酒” in simplified Chinese.
If I was to add other characters to the list, what would people recommend? I’m thinking Bulgarian, Portuguese, Italian, Vietnamese and Korean. All of these can be added pretty easily, Answer.com can generate all except Bulgarian and Korean. Google can handle Bulgarian and LingVoZone.com appears to have some really good free translation tools available, enough to handle Vietnamese. vdict.com also allows for Vietnamese translation of blocks of text and provides website integrations for website developers.
Language |
Word |
Water |
Bulgarian |
Български |
вода |
Italian |
Italiano |
acqua |
Korean |
한국어 |
물 |
Portuguese |
Português |
água |
Vietnamese |
tiếng việt |
nước |
Ah, so Bulgarian and Russian have the same word for Water, at least in script “вода”.
Compiling this list, I used Answers.com translations, Google translate and the Kamusi project.
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