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In Yugoslavia they speak five languages. In not one of them does the word stop exist, yet every stop sign in the country says just that.
I bring this up to make the somewhat obvious observation that English is the most global of languages.
http://f2.org/humour/quotes/language.html#MotherTongue
formerly known as etaoin...
France's greatest lexicographer, Emile Littré, was once found by his wife, in flagrante, and in the conjugal bedroom at that, with their housemaid. Happily, the exchange that followed makes sense almost as well in English as in French.
"Emile," cried Mrs Littré, "I am surprised!"
"No, my dear," replied the erring lexicographer calmly. "You are astonished. It is we who are surprised. "
It occurred to me that I did not know etymology of "astonish"
From AHD
astonish
SYLLABICATION: aˇstonˇish
PRONUNCIATION: -stnsh
TRANSITIVE VERB: Inflected forms: asˇtonˇished, asˇtonˇishˇing, asˇtonˇishˇes
To fill with sudden wonder or amazement. See synonyms at surprise.
ETYMOLOGY: Alteration of Middle English astonen, from Old French estoner, from Vulgar Latin *extonre : Latin ex-, ex- + Latin tonre, to thunder; see (s)ten- in Appendix I.
It's hard to know where to begin with this factoid. Yugoslavia only consists of Serbia and Montenegro these days, and there's Albanian, Romani, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Hungarian spoken there as well as Serbian and even Yugoslavian Sign Language is signed by 30K users. Yet they "have" no "word" for "stop". What kind of stop? The command to stop doing something, like driving (obustaviti)? The full stop that comes punctually at the end of a sentence (zastoj). The interruption of or intermission in something (prestanak)? I'm sure there's plenty more words for the many meanings of the English stop, but I'll stop at those.
Languages adapt themselves to their speakers' needs. This is one reason why I find it comico-tragical that folks fret so over the loss or gain of a word.
There's a great article called "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax" by Geoff Pullum that covers this fascination with language X doesn't have a word for Y, or language Q has N words for P. It's available in a book of the same title available at fine bookstores everywhere. Professor Pullum also contributes to a linguistics blog that's rather good:
http://www.languagelog.org/
OK. I know it's a joke, but why pick on Yugoslavia? So, every language in Europe has the word stop in it because of those international stopsigns. I seem to remember pranksters modifying the letters to read SPQR instead of stop. Speaking of Serbo-Croatian, an American who was visiting a mutual friend in Beograd once asked: "What are all these Pectobahs?" She was reading the Cyrillic for restaurant as though it was in the Latin alphabet.
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