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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.
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/
Entire Thread Subject Posted By Posted Stop wwh 03/07/04 08:32 PM Re: Stop Buffalo Shrdlu 03/07/04 08:58 PM astonish vs surprise wwh 03/07/04 09:51 PM Re: Stop the madness! jheem 03/07/04 10:33 PM Re: Stop the madness! Faldage 03/07/04 10:44 PM Re: Stop the madness! jheem 03/07/04 10:50 PM
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