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From: "Paul J. Kriha" <kriha_p@actrix.gen.nz>
Subject: Re: Most Internation Written Word
Message-ID: <D3L1uB.E2@actrix.gen.nz>
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Date: Mon, 6 Feb 1995 14:34:58 GMT
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xxdant@aol.com (XXdant) wrote:
>
> >A joke going around the linguistics department I was in a couple of
> >years ago was that the two original words in "the mother tongue" had to
> >be COFFEE and MANGO, as they are, roughly, 'coffee' and 'mango'
> everywhere.
> 
> Along with OK, right?
> 
> I looked up mango in the various dictionaries available to me and found
> that
> it's spelled that way in Spanish Italian Irish Norwegian Danish Swedish
> Dutch German SerboCroatian Slovak Polish Basque and Turkish.  Close
> spellings are
> 
> Portuguese manga
> Romanian mangotier
> French mangue
> Icelandic mangotre'  (accent on e)
> Czech mangovik

Wrong.
Mango (fruit) in Czech is mango.  Mangovni'k is a mango tree.

> Finnish mangopuu
> Hungarian mangofa
> 
> I could not find the word in Welsh Albanian Estonian Lithuanian and
> Slovene.
> 
> --
> Dan Tilque

