funny coincidence between languages

[Bouks]

Every once in a while, I come across something funny like this in my language studies.

Do you know why it was easy for me to remember the lesson vocabulary word "술" ? (No, it's not because I drink too much!)

The French word meaning "to get someone drunk" happens to be "soûler". So something that gets you drunk will make you "soûle". It's pronounced the same way as the Korean word. Strange but true...

[hyunwoo]

Haha That's such a coincidence!

Hehe. Here's one more example between Korean and French

The word '또랑' in Korean means something like a stream of water (not a big one though)

and the word 'torrent' in French is pronounced very similarly, and means a flow of water as well!

[Bouks]

That is interesting, about the torrent. And I learned a new word

Here's another funny language thing, but this time the meaning doesn't fit: the word "kalbi", in Arabic, means "my dog"! It sort of shocks me whenever I hear that word. So, please, don't make me eat my dog

[javiskefka]

How about this:

ne

Korean meaning: Yes

Serbian meaning: No

[Bouks]

How about this:

ne

Korean meaning: Yes

Serbian meaning: No

Neat!

...and French meaning: born

[Enkiae]

Here's one that always boggled me

the days of the week in China, Japan, India, Korea, and Europe have the same planets for the days!

It's less obvious in English...but think about French and Korean days of the week.

(my keyboard isn't working very well right now so I can't write in hangeul, sorry!)
Monday- Lundi- Weolyoil (Lundi- lune....even in English Monday= Moon day)
Tuesday- Mardi (mars)- hwayoil (hwa= fire, or fire planet aka mars)
Wednesday- Mercredi (Mercury) - suyoil (su- water, or waterplanet, mercury)
Thursday- Jeudi (Jeuve, Jupiter)- mokyoil (wood planet, jupiter)
Friday- Vendredi (Venus)- geumyoil (the metal/gold planet is...you guessed it, Venus )
Saturday (this one works in English too *Satur*n day)- Samedi - Doyoil
Sunday (*Sun*day)- Ilyoil.

[javiskefka]

In English, we have had our days named after Norse gods for the most part since the Vikings invaded England.

[holdfast]

the days of the week are the same in spanish as well: lunes, martes, miercoles, hueves, viernes, sabado, domingo (please pardon my spelling if it is not correct, it has been a long time since i've written anything in spanish).

[Bouks]

I was wondering, and had noted for a future forum topic, to ask about the meanings of the days of the week in Korean. Very interesting.

In Arabic and Persian, the days are essentially numbered, except for Friday ("jumu'a") which carries the meaning of a holy day. The Persian "shambe" for Saturday, also isn't an ordinal number, so I would be curious as to what it means. (Probably means "Don't even think of disturbing me, it's my day off.") But the other days around these are numbered (first day, second day, etc.)

[namisu]

A friend of mine once told me , that Turkish and Korean share the same roots, they are both supposed to be Altaic languages...I could not believe him at first, just thought he is kidding, because those two just s o u n d so different,right^^ but somehow there really seem to be similarities in grammar, maybe I'm wrong, but:
in Korean there exists this tendency to repeat,hmm, syllables, example:
눈이 퐁퐁 와요? ( I love that 퐁퐁, haha)
in Turkish that seems to exist, too... is anyone in here familiar with Turkish?

Something else just came in to my mind
family in Korean is 가족 , in Japanese it is kázoku...

[shanshanchua]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think both Korean and Japanese have their roots in the Chinese language. So that's why many words in these 3 languages sound similar. In fact, Korean used to be written entirely using Chinese characters (Hanja) although they were pronounced differently. It was only later that the Korean characters as we know them today were used.

[bialun]

in french there is an rude word "con" similar to english "c..t" but in korean it is a ball or even air...it's gotta be a hamja hieroglyph!
sorry for the obscenity, but when it's a linguistic talk everything is natural)

[Bouks]

Where I lived in France, the word "con" simply meant "moron". Still rude...but to refer to female anatomy in a pejorative manner, there were other nasty words to use. Never seems like there's a shortage of nasty words in any given language

[austinfd]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think both Korean and Japanese have their roots in the Chinese language. So that's why many words in these 3 languages sound similar. In fact, Korean used to be written entirely using Chinese characters (Hanja) although they were pronounced differently. It was only later that the Korean characters as we know them today were used.

Those languages share a certain history in that there is some common vocabulary (at least based on the Chinese characters)

But when linguists talk about the relationships among languages it is about much more than just vocabulary. They are interested in the structure of the language, and the development over history. Read the Wikipedia article for some good basic info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_language

[namisu]

The "Korean" word for a part time job is 아르바이트 ...
how did that come up? The German word "Arbeit" does not only mean part time, but job in general...full time part time any time^^

(by the way: Austin씨...
고마워요..I'm not a huge fan of wikipedia, but that link was useful, the article also mentioned the resemblance with Turkish....)