Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by TheFreim | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

TheFreim·

> Japan the the street light for go is “blue light” (青信号

I love these sorts of things. Language fascinates me so much, I hope to learn more about linguistics some day.

> particularly while drinking

Hopefully not while driving through blue green lights!

View on HN

Language is fascinating. I’ve found it interesting that two different cultures can have the exact same idioms. For example in English I say “goosebumps” while in Japanese it’s exact same, tori-hara (鳥肌) or chicken skin. Both cultures map the concept to a bird’s skin.

On a separate linguistic note, you’d probably really love the book “Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff. It’s all about how languages have the power to hide and highlight. It blew my mind when I first read it.

One of my favorite wikipedia articles is “Cross-Linguistic Onomatopoeias”[1] because it’s fun to look at the similarities and differences. An article of cross-linguistic idioms would be even more interesting! But probably much more difficult to compile.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-linguistic_onomatopoei...

Cross-linguistic idioms would be interesting to see. I suspect it has a lot more to do with the etymology of the idioms than anything else. For example, I know that the idiom "I'm a big boy" (meaning "I am capable") works in English and Russian, but in Turkish it comes out sounding more like "I'm a large child". Actually, I found lots of idioms are identical in English/Russian (there are some unique ones to each language), and I suspect it comes from a shared European ancestry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com