The Most Borrowed Words

Materials  In languages around the world, one can easily find words for materials like wood, copper, steel, and earthenware that have been around for ages.  Basic terms referring to materials like wood, metal, and clay across languages have often been discovered independently from one another across multiple people groups.  Even within a single language family, the word for a material as old and as widely used as iron can very enormously. Words for 'iron' in  Indo-European languages English iron Russian zeležo (зележо) Spanish hierro Albanian hekur Persian âhan (آهن) Words for 'iron' in  Niger-Congo languages          Zulu            i nsimbi          Akan           dade               KiKongo   kibende          Swahili     chuma Words for 'iron' in Aus...

When languages borrow from each other, by a large margin the largest group to be borrowed are nouns. In fact, almost every word mentioned here is a noun. For a whole host of reasons, verbs and adjectives are borrowed less often and function words like conjunctions, articles, and pronouns are borrowed least of all. Global Cognate Adjectives With all this in mind, it’s not surprising that the number of globally borrowed adjectives is relatively small.  Among these, the word sexy stands out the most for being one of the only adjectives that’s been so widely taken as a loanword. Very often the word is borrowed wholesale. English       sexy Hebrew       seksi Serbian         seksi Thai               sék-sîi In some languages, sexy is adapted by adding on native morphemes. Finnish     seksikäs          seksi + käs Swedish    sexig  ...

The need for regular means to measure weight and distance has been with societies for millennia. Having a standard for these is useful in science and technology, but most of all trade. Knowing how much of a product you're receiving or how far away something is is invaluable to people. Moreover, this has to be agreed upon across cultures, societies, and languages.  This makes words related to measurement an area that's full of cognate words that are often recognizable across the world. Gram, Meters, Liters Aside from a few stubborn holdouts, the metric system has more or less conquered the world as the de facto way to measure weight, volume, and length. Even in the US, rulers usually put inches on one side and centimeters on the other. And that’s the point of the metric system, to have a unified standard to facilitate science, study, and of course trade. And because it’s so widespread, a large part of the metric system has cognate words in languages around the world. We can find...