me trying to remember the Swahili word 𝑚𝑡𝑢𝑛𝑔𝑖 ("pot"): haha wouldn't it be funny if it was related to Chinese 桶? but wait it actually is

thinking about how Polish created this brand new word just using French parts, which doesn't exist in French

got Claude Code to write me a browser extension that adds IPA annotations to Danish websites, let's see if it really helps (this specific website also has built-in text-to-speech which improves the experience too)

things I learned thanks to my socialist Swahili textbook: 1. the Swahili word for "capitalist" comes from Hindustani 2. the Swahili word for "imperialist" might be Hindustani too, and in any case also means "billy goat" 🐐

Kevin Fei Sun 孙愷文@kebuhcah.bsky.social · last wk.

didn't realize until Lesson 12 that my German Swahili textbook was from East Germany ☭

didn't realize until Lesson 12 that my German Swahili textbook was from East Germany ☭

Swahili is full of Arabic words of course, but this would be the only case I know of where the vulgar Arabic word for "shit" got borrowed into another language

non-cognates of the day: хайр/xayr in Tajik - "good", "kindness" (from Arabic) хайр/xayr in Mongolian - "love", "mercy" (from Proto-Mongolic)

cognates of the day: дёргать/djórgatʹ - Russian for "to pull, to tug" дркати/drkati - Serbo-Croatian for "to jack off" dziergać - Polish for "to crochet, to embroider"

Chinese Tamil JP/KR/VN Malayalam 🤝 word meaning "name" used as counter for people 名 (míng) めい (mei)/명 (myeong)/danh பெயர்/பேரு (peyar/pēru) പേര് (pērŭ)

language learning tip: "if you want to speak English well, you have to smoke a pipe"

simu - "telephone" in Swahili, from Persian sīm ("wire, cord") sími - "telephone" in Icelandic, from Old Norse síma ("string, cord")

ሙሉ/mulu - "full, whole, complete" in Amharic முழு/muḻu - "full, whole, complete" in Tamil proto-Lemurian confirmed???

quite obvious in retrospect but I never considered that Swahili asante ("thank you") could be an Arabic borrowing 👀

new side quest unlocked

went to the weekly Seattle German meetup yesterday and somehow ended up practicing some Danish with a German guy from Schleswig-Holstein

in Polish you use the word "temu" to talk about the past, because recollections of the past are merely cheap knockoffs of our experience in the moment

𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 do you 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐧 the Swahili word for "silence, quiet" comes from "chemistry"??? ⚗️

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")