Last week, I’ve posted the first part of the geeky language facts and I received really good comments. First of all, I want to thank Buzzfeed for this funny compilation. I am a big fan of Buzzfeed and when they post lists about languages, I just love them more! 🙂
Here comes the second part!
26. ‘I’m a dot in a place’ is an anagram of ‘a decimal point’.
27. In Albanian there are 27 words for ‘moustache’ including ‘dirs ur’ – meaning the newly sprouted moustache of an adolescent.
28. In Hawaiian, the verb ‘pana po’o’ means to scratch your head in order to remember something you’ve forgotten.
29. In Sinhala (Sri Lanka) the word ‘ayubowan’ means ‘good morning’, ‘good afternoon’, ‘good evening’, ‘good night’ and ‘goodbye’.
30. In Masai, the name of a dead child, woman or warrior is not spoken again. If their name is also a word that is used every day, then it is no longer used by the bereaved family.
31. In Japan, four (shi) and nine (ku) are considered unlucky numbers, because the words sound the same as those for ‘death’ and ‘pain or worry’.
32. Because of this, some hospitals don’t have room numbers 4, 9, 14, 19 or 42. Forty-two (‘shi-ni’) means ‘to die’, 420 (‘shi-ni-rei’) means ‘a dead spirit’ and 24 (‘ni-shi’) is double death.
33. The Russian word for a railway station is ‘vokzal’. This is because when a Russian convoy visited Vauxhall in South London in 1840, they confused the name of the railway station there for the general name of the building. From then on, railway stations in Russia were called ‘vokzal’. Although this story has beencontested.
34. ‘Achaplinarse’ is a Spanish (Central American Spanish) word which means to hesitate and then run away in the style of Charlie Chaplin.
35. “Así te tragues un pavo y todas las plumas se conviertan en cuchillas de afeitar” is a Spanish curse, meaning ‘may all your turkey’s feathers turn into razor blades’.
36. The Romanian proverb ‘dacă doi îți spun că ești beat, du-te și te culcă’ translates as ‘if two people say you’re drunk, go to sleep’. Which is just good advice.
37. When a word spelled backward (such as ‘pots’), creates another word (‘stop’) it’s called a semordnilap, which is ‘palindromes’ backward.
38. A pangram is a sentence which contains every letter of the alphabet only once. For example: ‘Cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz’ which means ‘carved symbols in a mountain hollow on the bank of an inlet irritated an eccentric person’.
39. ‘Sgriob’ (Scottish Gaelic) denotes the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey.
40. ‘Lampadato’ (Italian) describes a person who gets tanned using a sun lamp.
41. ‘Katahara itai’ (Japanese) means laughing so much that one of your sides hurts.
42. ‘Backpfeifengesicht’ (German) means a face that cries out for a fist in it.
43. ‘Zastrich’ (Russian) means to cut one’s nails too short.
44. ‘Vogget’ (Cornish) means to hop on one leg.
45. ‘Guuguu’ (Japanese) describes the sound of someone in a deep sleep, snoring.
46. ‘Viajou na maionese’ is a Portuguese phrase meaning ‘to live in a dream world’ (literally to travel in the mayonnaise).
47. ‘U’ (Samoan) means an enlarged land snail.
48. ‘U’ (Xeta, Brazil) to eat animal meat.
49. ‘U’ (Burmese) means a male over 45 (literally an uncle).
50. In Somali there are 43 words relating to camels (for example, ‘cayuun’ meaning ‘camel spit’.)
51. ‘Ben’ (Turkish), ‘Ami’ (Bengali), ‘Fi’ (Welsh), ‘Jo’ (Catalan), ‘Mama’ (Sinhala), ‘Mimi’ (Swahili) and ‘Man’ (Wolof) all mean ‘I’.
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Source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/ailbhemalone/language-facts-that-will-blow-your-mind
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