[sound of drums]
[ jazzy lounge music ]
Now you would think that for every word in English,
there would be a version of that same word in every other language.
We have a word for “cat” Spanish has a word for “cat”
Turkish has a word for “cat”, and so on and so on.
But this isn’t always true, even for very simple words.
Say you took an American … and a Russian.
Now if you showed the American these two colors and asked her
if they were actually just different shades of the same color,
she’d say no – they’re different:
one is green and one is yellow.
And if you asked the Russian, he’d agree:
one is зеленый (the Russian word for green)
and one is желтый (yellow)
But now say you showed them these two,
the American would say yes, they’re both blue.
But the Russian would say no, they’re different, because Russian has two words that we would
translate as “blue”: синий for dark blue,
and голубой, meaning light blue
In Russian, the sky and the ocean are not the same color,
even though they are to speakers of most other languages.
This sort of difference in color vocabulary is actually pretty common.
In Hungarian, for instance, there are two reds:
“vörös” for dark red
and “piros” for light red.
And in Vietnamese, the word “xanh” can mean “green” or “blue”
so they if need to differentiate between the two, they’d have to say
“xanh like the ocean” for blue
or “xanh like a leaf” for green
But colors aren’t the only case where words don’t match up between different languages.
Consider Hindi, spoken in India – or Urdu, spoken next door in Pakistan.
Here we find the word “kal” written like this in Hindi, and like this in Urdu.
Strange as it may seem, kal means both yesterday and tomorrow
both days are called "kal"
Really it just means “one day removed from today”
Now this may seem insanely confusing,
but really it works out just fine for Hindi and Urdu speakers.
If they want kal to mean “yesterday” then they say “it was kal”
and for tomorrow, “it will be kal”
Of course, if someone asks “When’s your birthday?”
and you just say “kal” with nothing else
then that might be sort of be a non-answer
Now there are many other cases of this sort of thing
For instance, in Cantonese, there are two expressions for “thank you”
depending on whether you're thanking someone for an item or for a service
The Navajo language, meanwhile, has a very complicated verb system
that results in dozens of words for "throw"
depending on what you're throwing and how you throw it,
as well as dozens of words for "give" and "get" and so on.
And there are yet more examples of special vocabularies,
but you get the idea.