Multilingual word contest

Posted on November 13, 2007 by Steve

I used to routinely lose at a game some polyglot friends and I played via e-mail: trying to come up with the most translations of a given word without referring to any resources, and checking our efforts against a multilingual website.

Here's a new variation. Find a word that exists in the most languages, regardless of meaning, according to Wiktionary. When you search for a word there, the contents section gives a numbered list of the languages in which that word has been defined. That count will be the score, with ties broken by the number of distinct meanings.

To get things started, I submit pot, which appears in nine languages with seven distinct meanings.

English: a vessel used for cooking or storing food
Basque: kiss
Croatian: sweat
Czech: sweat
Dutch: pot
French: arse
Romanian: [I] can
Slovene: way
Tatar: A unit of volume
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Comments

Posted by Tony | November 13, 2007 | 11:39:57

Though Wiktionary claims to be all-inclusive when it comes to languages, it appears to be handicapped against languages that use non-Latin alphabets, and that in turn presents great difficulties for this project. For example, there is a Russian word край, pronounced exactly like the English "cry," but when you search for "cry" it does not come up.
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Posted by Tony | November 13, 2007 | 16:20:26

My previous complaint notwithstanding, to keep things rolling (please let me know if I should be posting these elsewhere), I submit the word par, which as of this writing carries definitions in twelve languages:

English: Number of strokes alloted for a whole in a game of golf (plus other definitions)
Faroese: Pair
French: By, for (preposition)
Hindi: On, at (preposition)
Icelandic: Pair
Kurdish: Share, part
Latin: Equal
Portugese: Pair
Romanian: Stake
Spanish: Pair
Swedish: Pair
Tamil: World

Several languages have more than one definition. For languages in which the word can be more than one part of speech, I listed the noun definition.
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Posted by Steve | November 13, 2007 | 18:01:51

I hadn't thought of the Latin bias, but that is a handicap. I'm also a bit disappointed that the Russian word you cited wasn't rendered properly in your comment, despite my having specified a unicode character set in MySQL. Let me try pasting it in: край

It's also possible that Russian-speaking Wiktionary members simply haven't gotten around to that word.

pa shows 18 definitions, including non-Latin Mandarin, Min Nan, and (Cyrillic/Latin) Serbian. Some of the definitions are suspect, so I won't count it an official submission.
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Posted by Tony | November 13, 2007 | 18:15:59

Do we eliminate degenerate cases? "a" shows definitions in 28 languages, but surely that ought not to count?
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Posted by Steve | November 13, 2007 | 18:49:52

A good point. Let's count only words of at least two letters and only those identified as nouns, adjectives, or verbs.
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Posted by beowulf | December 20, 2007 | 19:12:22

Pronouns always get short shrift.
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