always found it kind of amusing how this Thai word for "center", as in "city center", "shopping center" etc. just comes from the Sanskrit word for "zero" or "nothingness" I guess a shopping center is sort of a ground zero of shopping ⭕️

Hungarian verb prefix meaning "to death" literally means "on the brain" 🧠💀

Seattle update:

finally signed up for the Polyglot Gathering in Brno 🇨🇿

spotted today at Seattle's Museum of History & Industry - a land acknowledgement 𝐢𝐧 𝐋𝐮𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐭𝐬𝐞𝐞𝐝

formal Hungarian word for "to wish, to desire" is just derived from the interjection "oh"??? 😭

Turanic false friends of all time: öl - "to die" in Turkish öl - "to kill" in Hungarian

learned a useful new Gulf Arabic word today - and its etymology is related to camels, of course 🐪

travel plans for 2025 are starting to come together: strongly considering TUNISIA in May/June, before or after the Polyglot Gathering in Brno then hoping to spend three weeks in Asia in the fall, around the time of the Polyglot Conference in Taipei. (maybe Central Asia finally?)

Seattle language meetup update: checked out a weekly Japanese group on Monday and a biweekly Arabic group on Thursday, and found out about Portuguese, Korean and Russian groups to check out soon too 👀

Tigrinya spotted in Beacon Hill: "Jesus Christ is Our Savior"

Koreano-Tungusic confirmed

iroda - "office" in Hungarian (from ír, "to write") idora - "office" in Uzbek & Tajik (from Arabic idāra, "administration")

German meetup week #2: met a Georgian(/Austrian) and got to practice some Georgian 🇬🇪 🍻 (completely butchered the verb conjugation though)

Hungarian Georgian 🤝 using one preposition for spring/autumn 🌺🍂 and a different one for summer/winter 🌞❄️

two Hungarian words for "work": 1) 𝐝𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠 comes from Slavic *dъlgъ - "debt" 2) 𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐤𝐚 comes from Slavic *mǫka - "torture" what did they mean by this

first Elliot Bay Book Company book haul of many: Arabic poetry and Lushootseed folktales 📚

night #4: went to a French meetup and met a Scotsman who spoke Arabic (no meetup tomorrow, gotta catch the new Severance episode anyway)

night #3: BlaBla language exchange where I got to speak a bunch of Lebanese Arabic, plus Spanish, Italian and a little Farsi

night #2: German language meetup 🍻

new city, new indigenous language to learn 📚 #langsky

first night in Seattle: went to a Spanish language meetup and ended up getting some Polish practice too

"since he has reached the age of twelve, it would be good if he started Ge'ez" — gotta start 'em young!

every time in #Severance when they mention MDR (MacroData Refinement), I remember that MDR is French for LOL (mort de rire = dying of laughter)

brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "pardon my French"

bałwan in Old Polish: an idol, an object of idolatry🗿 bałwan in modern Polish: a snowman ☃️

needlessly complicated mnemonics of the day: 🌙 Georgian მთვარე/mtvare ("moon") sounds like Rwanda-Rundi umutware ("chief, leader") ☀️ Georgian მზე/mze ("sun") sounds like Swahili mzee ("elder") and the sun and the moon are the leaders/elders of the sky

funny thing in the DeepSeek paper - the initial version of the model, DeepSeek-R1-Zero, had a tendency to *mix languages* in its thought process. to improve readability, the researchers forced the model to only think in one language... and this made it (slightly) dumber 😭💀

languages overheard in Death Valley this weekend: English, Mandarin, Spanish, Norwegian, Cantonese, Korean, Hindi, German, Telugu, Shanghainese, Russian, French, Japanese...

big fan of how the Finnish word for "poem" is related to English "rune" and also Irish rún ("mystery, secret")

illu - "house" in Greenlandic, related to "igloo" illu - "house" in Telugu, from proto-Dravidian *il

for a second I thought "Benzin" (gasoline in German/Russian/etc.) might be related to "Benz" as in Mercedes-Benz or Carl Benz ("father of the automobile") but the truth is so much weirder: it comes from the mispronunciation of the Arabic phrase for "Javanese frankincense" 😵‍💫

of all the languages I've looked up words in on Wiktionary, Finnish has got to have the most entries where it says exactly who coined the word and when and also what their job was

lol ok so the little bird with the forked tail can mean "great" or "important" and the little bird with the rounded tail means "bad" or "small", perfect

Glendale language meetup update: I was already pretty stoked to chat with someone from Kazakhstan this time, but then there was another guy from the *Tuva Republic* who knew Mongolian and Kazakh too 🍻 (fortunately my area wasn't too seriously impacted by the fires...)

kind of remarkable how this Spanish word for "horseman", used in phrases like "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse", comes from the name of a Berber tribe 🏇

both theories for the etymology of Russian ерунда/yerunda ("nonsense") are hilarious, either a) it comes from Latin "g𝐞𝐫𝐮𝐧𝐝ium" because Latin grammar is nonsense, or b) it comes from German "hi𝐞𝐫 𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐝𝐚" because German sounds like nonsense

never going to be able to see the word "anon" again without remembering that it's the Coptic word for "we/us"

medieval Arab writer explaining the end of the Tang dynasty: it's like when Persia fell apart because of Alexander the Great

stumbled upon some ancient bidet-versus-toilet-paper discourse in this 9th-century Arabic travelogue I'm reading 🧻💦

"a mistaken calque" lmao - like oops, we mistakenly thought you guys were calling it a "doom church" this whole time 😅⛪

not setting many specific language goals for 2025 except one thing: it'd be nice to understand Moroccan Arabic as well as I currently understand Tunisian #langsky #langtwt

English Maghrebi Arabic 🤝 using the French loanword "𝒑𝒍𝒂𝒄𝒆" in𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗱 of native words in English "place" replaced "stead" and "stow" in Darija "blāṣa" seems to be used more often than "makān" etc.

lol so Russian borrowed the Mongolian word for "horse" just to end up using it as slang for "Mercedes"

tired: "felsic" vs "mafic" rock wired: "kikic" vs "boubic" rock

been reading a bit about geology lately and like, the way they came up with terminology in this field seems so unhinged lol (the opposite of "felsic", "mafic", comes from "magnesium" + "ferric" 😵‍💫)

ikkuna - Finnish for "window" ikkuna (있구나) - Korean for "wow, it turns out there is..." Ikkuna ikkuna! - Finno-Korean for "Wow, it turns out there's a window!"

meanwhile in real life, Finnish "arvo" and Indonesian "harga", which both mean "value/worth/price", do actually come from the same Indo-Iranian root 🤯

suku - Finnish for "extended family" suku - Indonesian for "clan, ethnicity" jalan - Finnish for "by foot" jalan - Indonesian for "road, to walk" Finnonesian confirmed?

left: etymology of "Oslo" (Norwegian Bokmål) right: etymology of "Oslo" (Norwegian Nynorsk)