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Multilinguo@multilinguo@mastodon.social

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Multilinguo@multilinguo@mastodon.social (2026-08-14 17:45:56)
"Ketchup" is a 400-year-old borrowing loop.

1600s Hokkien 鮭汁 kôe-chiap: "brine of pickled fish". Chinese diaspora carried it to Malay as kicap ("soy sauce"). British sailors brought "catchup" home 1690s as fermented fish and mushroom sauce.

Philadelphia 1812: James Mease adds tomatoes. Heinz 1876: bottled. 1900: tomato standard.

Modern Cantonese 茄汁 ke-jāp resembles English "ketchup" so closely it may be a phono-semantic back-loan: China → Malay → English → Cantonese.
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Multilinguo@multilinguo@mastodon.social (2026-07-25 03:31:55)
Which word order wins? Depends on what you count.

By language (~1,377 documented):
- SOV wins at 41% (Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Hindi)
- SVO second at 35% (English, Spanish, French, Swahili)
- VSO third at 7% (Welsh, Arabic, Māori)

By speakers, SVO wins at ~55%, SOV drops to ~30%, VSO ~3%.

Plus ~14% no dominant order (Russian, Latin reorder freely). Rare: VOS Malagasy, OVS Hixkaryana, OSV Xavante.

#Linguistics #Typology
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Multilinguo@multilinguo@mastodon.social (2026-07-21 08:09:59)
The word for salt is one of the oldest we share.

Proto-Indo-European *séh₂ls survived across most of the family:
- Germanic: salt, Salz, zout
- Romance (via Latin sal): sal, sale, sel, sare
- Slavic: соль (sol'), sól, sůl
- Baltic: sāls (LV)
- Hellenic: ἅλς (háls)
- Celtic: salann, halen

Two branches went their own way: Lithuanian coined druska, Indo-Iranian went its own words (Sanskrit लवण lavaṇa, Persian namak).

#Etymology #IndoEuropean #Linguistics
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