Newsgroups: sci.lang
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From: trey@lurch.BRS.Com (Trey Jones)
Subject: Re: Most Internation Written Word
Message-ID: <1995Feb3.195715.10484@lurch.BRS.Com>
Organization: Grammar Ain't Me
Date: Fri, 3 Feb 1995 19:57:15 GMT
Lines: 20

In article <D37w5J.61C@indirect.com> stevemac@bud.indirect.com (Pascal MacProgrammer) writes:
>Not so very long ago, xxdant@aol.com (XXdant) said...
>
>>I'm looking for the most international written word.  By this, I meant
>>the word that is spelled the same and means the same in the [largest]
>>number of different languages. 

I'm not so sure about spelling.. will you settle for pronunciation?
Very few things will be spelled the same in English, Russian, Hebrew and
Chinese :)

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.

Of course, quite the opposite history is true.. they are more recent (and
in the case of coffee, very popular) borrowings.

-Trey
Evil Linguist
