Re: Familiar words

Peter Moylan filted:

I've recently received a book/brochure/pamphlet from the Australian
Government. About 24 pages of almost-A4. On the penultimate page there
are instructions on how to get a translated copy in any of 16 different
pages. The thing that struck me was the word used to describe this
pamphlet varied noticeably between closely related languages, but that
in most cases the word was close to something an English speaker might
have understood. Except, I guess, where a cognate of the Russian "k***"
was used.

In case anyone's interested, here's the list. I've removed diacritics
that were hard to type, and left case endings the way they were, through
ignorance of what the nominative might have been.

Bosnian: knjizicu
Croatian: broshuru
Greek: bibliario
Bahasa Indonesia: buklet
Italian: opuscolo
Macedonian: knishka
Russian: buklet
Serbian: knizhitsu
Spanish: folleto (Are you there, James?)

I couldn't figure out what the word was in Vietnamese, Turkish, Korean,
Cambodian, Chinese, or two unidentifiable languages that both use
Arabic script.

(The choice of languages is, I gather, based on census data showing
which are the most-spoken languages in Australia.)

No Japanese, then?...any chance you could scan this page and put it somewhere on
the Web?...with all the languages spoken in aue, we ought to be able to figure
out the other versions....r


--
"You got Schadenfreude on my Weltanschauung!"
"You got Weltanschauung in my Schadenfreude!"
.

Quantcast