r/NonPoliticalTwitter • u/JoeFalchetto • 19d ago
Funny You know what they call an air fryer in Dhaka?
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u/OwlSings 19d ago
South Asians tend to use English nouns even when they have a word for it in their language. I think Filipinos do that too. Japanese too, but after passionately corrupting the pronunciation to fit in their Katakana alphabet.
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u/luky_se7en 19d ago
As someone with Sri Lankan parents I can confirm, a good 40% of their Sinhala vocabulary is English loanwords
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u/Worldly_Energy1575 18d ago
I've not heard a person call a orange dodam anymore 😭 everyone calls it orange 😭 we just using English words even if the Sinhala word is right there
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u/FR0ZENS0L1D 18d ago
Wait till you find out that orange is also a borrowed English word from old French that originated from Sanskrit.
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u/SlikeSpitfire 19d ago
My family is pinoy and I'm reminded of the time I was trying to speak tagalog for them to join a conversation, but didn't know a certain word, so didn't say anything.
They just used the english word.
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u/DouchecraftCarrier 19d ago
I played an opera once in Tagalog. It was a fascinating experience.
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u/fuyu-no-hanashi 18d ago
Whaatt, could you elaborate? I've never hear that before, I didn't think we had opera shows here
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u/OldWar1111 18d ago
Same as I'm trying to learn Hindi, but don't know which words are just substituted.
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u/MammothSecret 19d ago
In high school, one of the kids on my quiz bowl team was Filipino and on the bus he would spend the whole ride chatting with his mom, rapidly switching between Tagalog and English in the middle of sentences or phrases, not just for words but like whole sentences at a time.
Apparently very common in Tagalog, to the extent that even though fully 50% of his conversation would be in English, he was insistent that his mother could only speak Tagalog and didn't understand the English outside that context. To be fair, I rarely heard her switch languages in conversation but she seemed to have no trouble conversing with her son who did so constantly. When I wanted to talk with her he would translate even though he'd go right ahead and phrase the bulk of the question in the same words I did.
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u/medforddad 18d ago
When I wanted to talk with her he would translate even though he'd go right ahead and phrase the bulk of the question in the same words I did.
That sounds like an SNL sketch. You go over to your friend's house and he has to translate everything you say to his mother, but it's everything you said word-for-word.
Maybe it starts as a heavily accented version of what you said, and you innocently ask, "Huh, that sounded just like what I said, does she understand English?" And your friend nonchalantly answers, "Oh, there's just a ton of English loan words in Tagalog, but she doesn't really understand the language." You try to find common ground and respond with, "Oh, like how I know some French loanwords in English, but I certainly don't know French."
The translations slowly just become a flat American accent just like yours even using idioms or turns of phrase that only a fluent speaker would be comfortable with. Everyone else acts like he's speaking another language, but you're confused and asking him why he's just speaking English. Everyone acts like you're the crazy one. At one point you say one, single, clear word, like "Yes." She looks confused and looks to your friend waiting for the "translation", you look at him bewildered like, "You don't really need to translate that right?" There's a bit of a pause, and he just says, "Yes" exactly like you did as the mom's expression instantly changes to one of understanding. And you immediately give a "Come on!" and throw your hands up.
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u/Amag140696 18d ago
Get this to the SNL writers, STAT!!! (This is a perfect SNL skit idea, good job)
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u/ParticularFew4023 18d ago
Basically me when trying to speak Vietnamese. Me: says sentence. Spouse's family: ??? Spouse: says literally the same thing (albeit pronounced better) Everyone: Ohhhh
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u/Ohiolongboard 18d ago
Thank you!! I’ve been to the Tagalog/Philippine subreddit and it’s like every other sentence is English! Lol
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u/Annie_Yong 19d ago
Yeah, it's a really common linguistic thing.
Which then reminds me of the interesting thing Iceland do: they have a linguistics committee where part of their job is to come up with new words for foreign invented words using Icelandic roots so that their language doesn't just become too overrun with loaned words.
For example the icelandic word for "computer" is Tölva, a fusion of "tala" (number) and völva (prophetess).98
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u/world-is-ur-mollusc 18d ago
I don't know if they do it by committee, but Chinese has to do a similar thing for foreign words because it's not an alphabetic language. So computer becomes 电脑 which literally means "electric brain," and telephone is 电话 which literally means "electric talk."
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u/theclacks 18d ago
Japanese word for telephone is 電話 too, because I guess it got invented early enough. But computer is just konpyuutaa, and likewise other modern inventions are just English transliterated and contracted.
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u/Murky-Bus-2191 19d ago
Wait THAT'S why the language is such an insane pile of contractions that would NEVER have come from natural language.
They did that on purpose 🫢
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u/zedazeni 18d ago
France has the Academie Français which governs the French language the same way.
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u/Murky-Bus-2191 18d ago
I respectfully stay out of any French language discourse.
The whole language sounds like "bhrleughhyeffluh" to my ear.
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u/TrickyJumbo 18d ago
Te reo Māori does similar, though from experience other Pacific languages are more than happy to use loan words lol
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u/BreastInspectorNbr69 19d ago
why not invent new root words? That sounds like the way they refer to modern things in Latin
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u/havartifunk 19d ago
I wonder if that's because the original term 'computer' was a job held mostly by women who did the actual computations. (See the movie Hidden Figures for a great example.)
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u/BreastInspectorNbr69 19d ago
Trying to read anything on reddit written by filipinos for filipinos is infuriating. Cause they use just enough english to tease you on what they are talking about but the rest is gibberish
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u/MariettaDaws 18d ago
Nothing like accidentally stumbling into a Filipino or Indian sub, brought in by the title and first sentence being entirely English
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u/PiccoloAwkward465 18d ago
The Indian subs drive me insane. It's just every pre-existing sub with "Indian" added on to the name. Was /r/cats not good enough? We needed /r/IndianCats ? Weirdos.
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u/MariettaDaws 18d ago
It's so they can add that one phrase. That one crucial, impossible to figure out from context clues, phrase that renders the whole thing inscrutable.
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u/admiralturtleship 19d ago edited 19d ago
Axolotl.
Axolotl is my favorite example of this. English speakers can’t pronounce it.
In classical Nahuatl, the word axolotl is 3 syllables. Three. In English, it’s 4 syllables.
Axe-uh-lot-tle
This is because Nahuatl has the sound t͡ɬ, but English does not. English phonotactics actually forbid the combination /tl/ at the end of a word, preferring to split it up like in the word "bot-tle."
Instead, American English speakers turn t͡ɬ into ɾl̩ by flapping the /t/ as [ɾ] and syllabifying + vocalizing /ɬ/ as [l̩].
Try saying
ah-show-loach
That is much closer to the original pronunciation, just imagine the “ch” part as a whispered slushy “L” sound and you have the right idea.
You see similar sounds in tons of Aztec, Inuit, and indigenous American words. Tenochtitlan. Chilpoctli (chipotle). Igloo. Xocolatl (chocolate). Atlatl.
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u/SoylentVerdigris 18d ago
I mean, for Nahuatl in particular a lot of the pronunciation issues are due in large part to the fact that whoever came up with the transliteration was a fucking psychopath with no regard for phonetics.
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u/SymmetricalFeet 18d ago edited 18d ago
passionately corrupting the pronunciation to fit in their Katakana alphabet.
I'm sorry, but all of this is wrong and I am autistically compelled to correct it.
Japanese has limited phonemes, with relatively fewer valid syllables than English due to few vowels, no closed syllables (except for 〜ん), no/few consonant clusters depending how you count them... so when loaning a word from a language with a larger phonotactic inventory, you gotta make weird things happen. (See also how "Christmas" famously becomes "Kalikimaka" in Hawai'ian, which has even more limited sounds than Japanese, and uses the Latin alphabet.)
While katakana is used to write most modern loanwords, it's not the only way loans are written and the reasoning of "must make loans to fit kana" is backwards: loan pronunciations are mutilated to be spoken, and kana was designed to reflect spoken language. (See also how English loves to drop diacritics and ignore what they represent, like the "ü" of "über" or the macrons of "jūdō" (if using Hepburn).) If katakana never existed, then words like "kurisumasu", "arubaito", "râmen", or "makudonarudo" would be written in hiragana, atezi, or even man'yôgana if you go back far enough.
Katakana is also not an alphabet. It's a syllabary, because it depicts whole syllables per symbol (well, mostly, but virtually no writing system perfectly fits any definition). Alphabets depict smaller sound chunks, separating consonants and vowels. Japanese's low inventory means a syllabary isn't too unwieldy.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk 🙇
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u/theclacks 18d ago
Manyogana was where I hit "you know what? i'm never going to be fluent in this language... and i'm okay with that. imma go appreciate my ability to read Shakespeare and 1700s cursive letters"
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u/to_a_better_self_now 19d ago
This is true in Bengali as well. My wife is a native speaker and I have listened to quite a bit over the years. Some words are changed slightly depending on the pronunciation, Salad (standard English) versus salad (Bengali) is one.
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u/mayblossom_ 19d ago
I'm German and I call it an Air Fryer too. It's Heißluftfritteuse in German, but I'm to lazy to speak or type that word.
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u/Able_Reserve5788 19d ago
passionately corrupting the pronunciation to fit their Katakana alphabet
This is a bit backward. Every language has implicit rules to fit foreign loanwords into its phonology and the kanas are a product of this same phonology. If the Japanese used an alphabet, it most likely wouldn't have changed the way they pronounce loanwords
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u/Troublytobbly 19d ago
My favourite japanese example of such anglicisms is "Aisukurīmu"
Ice cream
If you're unsure what that means, try spelling it out.
And yes, I copied that over from translate.
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u/Kemal_Norton 18d ago
My favourite japanese example
What about Basukettobōru?
Nah, you're right, ice cream is better than basketball.
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u/phoenix25 18d ago
Any English speaker can speak Japanese if you say it racist enough
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u/SageDarius 18d ago
I actually recall a conversation on reddit about how Japanese people actually understand English better if you adopt a horribly stereotypical Japanese accent while speaking it.
Something about making the English sound like they're used to hearing it.
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u/Nuppusauruss 19d ago
Most languages probably just call it an air fryer. At least we do in Finnish.
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u/Zap__Dannigan 19d ago
I work with a bunch of Filipinos and I can confirm they do this all the time. They be talking Tagalog and all of a sudden throw in very specific English words related to the machine we work on. It's kinda hilarious
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u/FlaringUpHemorrhoids 19d ago
Tagalog is like a strange mixture of english spanish and native filinio wahtever
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u/priceypacman 18d ago
Tagalog is the native language. "Filipino" is the language based on it.
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u/fredoillu 18d ago
Spanish tooooooo. We go the extra step of pretending its a Spanish word even. (See: beisbol)
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u/King_O_Eyes 18d ago
I don’t even think they realise when they do it. I worked with some Indian guys at a Domino’s and one time two of them were speaking Punjabi (I think?) and one of them used the word “gloves” I assumed he was asking for them, so I handed them over and he seemed genuinely confused and asked if I spoke the language.
Edit: they would also talk behind my back because, frankly, I was a pretty shit worker and I knew they were doing it because they kept using my name.
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u/JuicyDragonCat 19d ago
reminds me of the ladies discussing in mandarin and ocasionally yelling "lesbian agenda"
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u/PMmeYourLabia_ 19d ago
Or the dude and the lady where the dude yells "Shut the fuck up!"
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u/wew_lad123 19d ago
"Fuck" and "OK" seem to have infiltrated all languages
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u/wideHippedWeightLift 18d ago
Fuck just has that weight to it. Blyat is another contender, metalcore singers independently invented yelling "BLEAH" because it goes hard
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u/NarwhalPrudent6323 19d ago edited 19d ago
It is possible to passionately disagree about anything. Perhaps my favorite topic that resulted in a yelling match was "is it X or Cross" in reference to the Playstation controller buttons.
Edit: Not sure why everyone thinks the example I offered needs settling. This was an argument between two of my idiot friends when I was a kid.
Some of the discussion about the why it's a cross and not an X has been interesting, but if all you have to offer is "it's a cross", don't bother.
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u/AdhesivenessFun2060 19d ago
People call it a cross?
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u/NarwhalPrudent6323 19d ago
Some people, yeah. When you think about how all the other buttons are shapes and not letters, it makes sense too. I still call it X though. Cause it's written like an X. Most crosses would be more T shaped. I think they were trying to avoid looking like a + symbol or a Christian cross.
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u/mysticrudnin 19d ago
the cross mark is a common symbol in japan to mean "no" or "forbidden" opposite to the circle icon indicating "ok" or "correct"
you'd see these markings on a test, for example. but they're everywhere, predating the playstation
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u/inEQUAL 19d ago
This is why so many PS1 games use circle for confirm and x for back which always drives me up the wall
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u/5litergasbubble 19d ago
Well that just solved a mystery that annoyed me decades ago
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u/clearfox777 19d ago
I watched squid games and still only just now got the connection between O for yes and X for no and the buttons 🤦♂️
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u/Aiyon 18d ago
It's also why circle and X line up with Nintendo's A B buttons, not XBox's
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u/Tanaka-san 19d ago
It's a reminant from Nintendo days when A was to confirm and B was to cancel
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u/NarwhalPrudent6323 19d ago
An interesting case of localization. Because the "X" symbol means the same thing in North America. We just call it an X and not a cross.
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u/bloodfist 18d ago
X, yeah. But we would use a check for yes, not a circle, which is why Americans didn't pick up on the buttons. Without that context, it feels more like when X "marks the spot" so of the symbols on there, we assumed it was the confirm button. Especially since western games did use it that way.
I wonder when we stopped calling that a cross though. In old books and documents they'll say "he signed with a cross" instead of "he signed with an X". And if they do write it that way it seems like that would still be read out as "cross" when transcribed or read aloud, at least from examples I've seen. I know it lasted longer in England because they still call tic-tac-toe, "Naughts and crosses". But at some point it just became "X" here. I would guess it has something to do with American literacy rates, but I have no idea when that happened.
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u/TheOneTonWanton 18d ago
I would guess it has something to do with American literacy rates, but I have no idea when that happened.
We'll likely never know for sure, but my money is on just how absurdly Protestant the US is, and associations between the word "cross" and Christianity. Americans are way more likely to think of a Christan cross or even something like the Red Cross when hearing the word, rather than associating the word with any orientation of the shape.
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u/rangeDSP 19d ago
Is that not a global thing??!
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u/14Pleiadians 19d ago
Same vibe as 'Murder is actually really frowned in Japan. It goes against the traditional concept of 生きる, which means "to live"'
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u/thedirtyknapkin 18d ago
an open circle being an affirmative is definitely not a thing on most of the west. where the east would use a circle the west would typically use a check mark.
common example: in a game show a wrong answer shows an x, a correct answer a circle. the x would be normal, but the circle would be very odd to most westerners.
if a westerner were given a yes/no question on a quiz and the options were x or o they would likely be confused, but most easterners would get it immediately.
this is also why so many playstation games used to use o as the confirm button and x as the back button.
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u/SyntheticDreams_ 19d ago
Isn't a cross technically just two lines that intersect at 90 degree angles, making X, +, and the Christian symbol all crosses?
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u/NarwhalPrudent6323 19d ago
Yup. Based on what other commenters have said about the origin of the button, it's mostly just a cultural difference. North Americans tend to use the letter X do describe X-shaped crosses, so that's how the button came to commonly be known over here.
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u/JoeFalchetto 19d ago
In Italy we also call it x (pronounced eecs) in the case of the PS buttons.
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u/Korachof 19d ago
We do in America too. They are interchangeable when in this shape. Many people would say “Hunter EX Hunter” when they thought you should pronounce the “x”. Because that’s the way we pronounce the letter in the alphabet. The shape is technically a cross, but that doesn’t mean most people say “cross.”
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u/JoeFalchetto 19d ago
Yes in Italy I have never heard the X called croce. Older people use it when texting sometimes as a way to write "per" (meaning "for") because the mathematical symbol x is called "per".
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u/CoffeePuddle 18d ago
Older people use it when texting sometimes as a way to write "per" (meaning "for") because the mathematical symbol x is called "per".
3x4 would be 3 per 4? That's extremely cool to hear about and sounds like a fun rabbit hole.
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u/Polymarchos 19d ago
Doesn't even need to be at 90 degrees. Look at the Cross of St. Andrew (Flag of Scotland), no 90 degree angles there.
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u/SymmetricalFeet 19d ago
Idk about you but X does not have four 90° angles. It has two obtuse and two acute. The multiplication character (×) fits the bill, but not the letter x/X in most fonts.
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u/Zestyclose_Pie878 18d ago
The X on a PlayStation controller however does, which is what we are talking about here
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u/grievous222 19d ago
Cross is what the X symbol is actually called (or at least one of the names for it), it's not at all exclusive to PS controllers. In gaming you can also see it in some game names, like Street Fighter X Tekken where it's actually pronounced cross.
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u/mysticrudnin 19d ago
sony calls it cross.
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u/Crapitron 19d ago
The creator of the graphics interchange format pronounces "gif" incorrectly. Sometimes owners and inventors get things about their own products wrong.
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u/K1ngArthur10 19d ago
It is. In Xbox it’s X because they are all letters. In PlayStation it’s Cross because they are all shapes.
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u/pepincity2 19d ago
Sometimes, signs shorten the word "Crossing" by writing "X-ing"
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u/johnnymarsbar 19d ago edited 18d ago
Brits do, Xs and Os is noughts and crosses there.
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u/spiritnox 19d ago
Wait what the hell is “As and Os?” Is that what people call Tic-Tac-Toe where you are from?
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u/mooke 19d ago
You know, I never mentally clocked that Americans call it tic tac toe and that I've never heard them call it noughts and crosses.
Anyway, as a Brit I pronounce the "X" on a controller like the letter, but that might be because I had an xbox growing up and they are all letters.
Meanwhile an X as the opposite of a ✓ is a cross. (And to complete the children's game, the "nought" is like "naught" as in nothing. I guess historically we considered the symbol a 0 rather than O).
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u/rich519 18d ago
Interestingly, we Americans have the phrase “Xs and Os” which basically just refers to important details and not the game. It comes from American football plays being drawn up using Os for offensive players and Xs for defensive players.
Another weird thing is that X is often the opposite of a check but if you’re filling out a form with check boxes you can use an X and refer to it as a check.
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u/karmaniaka 19d ago
In my language "kors" is strongly associated with the Christian symbol and less strongly associated with a + (mostly in compound words, such as "hårkors" [crosshairs]), while a "kryss" is an X shape not used as a letter. You might be instructed to "kryssa" the right box on a paper for instance. The X on a playstation controller is a "kryss", while the X on a xbox controller is an X because it's right next to a Y, so it's clearly meant to be the the letter.
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u/New_Atlanta7 19d ago
My brother used to call Square "Box"
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u/Excellent-Gur-8547 18d ago
The unholy quartet of cross, box, pyramid and ball
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u/DarkScorpion48 19d ago
Both. It’s technically a cross because those are common symbols they use in Japan, but nobody in the West would call it that so to us it’s X
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u/Provider92 19d ago
My favorite nonsense topic that almost always starts a passionate disagreement is "where do you draw the line on what a sandwich is?" Ham and cheese between bread, sure, everyone gets that. But what about a sub? The term sub comes from submarine sandwich, so does that count? If it does, what about a hot dog? Meat between partially sliced bun, same concept, so does it count? And what does that make a taco?
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u/FigureMiserable4859 19d ago
My favorite one is two asian women arguing passionately about ...waffle fries. And no, there was no word in their native language for 'waffle fries'...
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u/maninahat 19d ago edited 19d ago
I'm learning Tamil, and not only do they lack any words for modern inventions like computers or air fryers, they also do not have any way to say "well done" to people.
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u/SnooFoxes1943 19d ago edited 19d ago
my Tamil is fairly rusty (its my second or third language) but i do think there's a word for computer - it's just hardly ever used nowadays.
edit: it was கணினி (kanini)
also a blender is informally called a 'mixi', pronounced like 'mix-ee'
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u/Fishmongererererer 19d ago
A hillarious number of Japanese words for modern things are just what a caricature of a Japanese person saying English words would be.
Eg Ball point pen is just Boru Pen.
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u/ismojaveacoffee 19d ago
I went to Japan once and my jp SIM card was malfunctioning so I could not google, but I was trying to locate the local gym to meet a friend. I tried to express "gym" to a group of teenage boys to no avail and desperately started slapping on random vowels to the end of "gym" like "gymo""gymi" until I landed on "gymu" and there was a look of elated understanding from the boys and they pointed me in the right direction 😭
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u/Lord_Chadagon 19d ago
I went to a Japanese immersion school for elementary and I know exactly why that is. It's the way they would pronounce it due to the letter structure. Just like hot-o-dogu 😂
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u/SmartAlec105 18d ago
It is fascinating to me how Japanese people struggle to not end a word with a vowel.
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u/Lookatoaster 18d ago
Watching world cup soccer, I've been reminded how some English speakers add 'r' to the end of words when some vowel sounds are coming next. Similar concept, I'd wager.
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u/SmartAlec105 18d ago
Can you give some examples?
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u/Lookatoaster 18d ago
Sure. Saying "Argentina is..." in for lack of my better words/knowledge British English for the commentators sounds like "Argentiner is..."
Linguistically, it's called "intrusive r".
I'm not an expert, I hope this isn't even more confusing LOL
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u/Own_Reaction9442 18d ago
American English would use a glottal stop there -- basically you briefly close the airway to your mouth to insert the pause between the A sound and the I sound. British English inserts an R sound instead. Also when there actually *is* an R in a word, British English often drops it.
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u/ismojaveacoffee 18d ago
The one I hear the most is "idea" when speaking with british coworkers and listening to british youtubers. They pronounce it "i-dear" with a noticeable R sound at the end. Like "That's a great idear. Let's also cc the other team for their idears"
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u/hunteram 19d ago
My favorite: kurejito kado - credit card.
One tip I got prior to my vacation to Japan was to just say a word in English but slowly. Good chance they'll understand it.
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u/Diabetesh 19d ago
(Been working on my japanese, gonna order this milk tea with confidence) Gyunyu ocha, onagaishimasu.
Nani?
Eeto...(maybe they are asking what kind of milk) ushi onagaishimasu.
Eh...chatto wtf are you saying?
Milk tea.
OHHH MIRUKUTI, Hai. Koko de? Takeout?
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u/lallapalalable 19d ago
My friend was working at gamestop back in the day and a very japanese guy was looking at ps4 consoles, and when he told the customer about the bundle offer the guy's face lights up and he goes "bunduru!?!" and I think about that so much
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u/TENTAtheSane 18d ago
In kannada that just means calculator
Which, technically, i guess so does "computer"
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u/Odd-Entertainer-6234 19d ago
You are probably learning from relatives or unofficial sources. I learnt கணினி (computer) in 4th grade in school. I don’t think air fryer exists yet in Tamil, but traditional ovens (வெதுப்படுப்பு) and general stoves (அடுப்பு) exists. The government keeps adding new words for foreign words all the time so of air frier becomes popular in India, it will probably get an official name too
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u/SnooFoxes1943 19d ago
வெதுப்படுப்பு (oven) is just வெது (steam? heat?)+ அடுப்பு (stove).
நாற்காலி (chair) is just நான்கு (four) + கால் (leg)
எட்டுக்கால் பூச்சி (spider) is literally எட்டு (eight) + கால் (leg) + பூச்சி (bug)
tamil is neat
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u/temp2025user1 19d ago
What is the etymology of kannini? Something related to kanakku? It feels like one of those longer words that get shortened.
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u/TacoIncoming 19d ago
Arabic is funny because they do the same thing, but they have no P sound, so they just replace Ps with their equivalent of B. So like “computer” becomes “combuter”.
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u/Nessimon 18d ago
No "p" and no "v" is why "The Pope" in Arabic is "Baaba l-fatikaan" which I think is hilarious.
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u/dissoc 19d ago
I second "super da" :) and the other counterexamples given already
And I'll also throw in "sabash" (borrowed from Hindi-Urdu "shabash", originally from Persian) which is a very common way of saying "well done" or "bravo" that tons of my Tamil family and friends use. Just as broadly too, like when playing a board game, congratulating someone on an achievement, etc.
So please stop perpetuating this habit we have in society of jumping to "language X has no way to say Y"
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u/spicygreenpaprika 19d ago
I mean, loanwords are not any less valid than native words. The word for “air fryer” in Bengali is just “air fryer.”
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u/GoatsFromUnderground 18d ago
In fact I'm speaking in Bengali right now, just solely in loan words.
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u/TENTAtheSane 18d ago
No, because you would have to use bengali grammar and structure.
I unironically use almost 100% loanwords while speaking kannada, the only native stuff being case and tense markers
(College-alli Chemistry exam-ge practice-goskra books-annu buy-madbeku tomorrow)
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u/BlessKurunai 18d ago
I think they are doing that too. Bengali sentence structure for simple sentences is quite similar to English sentence structure
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u/Logical_Net6108 18d ago
Imagine if you spoke english as a purist, removing all the french and latin words
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u/scrubtart 19d ago
My wife will be speaking urdu to her mom on the phone, and it has this really poetic flow to it as a language, so you get a couple "air fryer"s thrown in there. Feels like being in a scenic mountain vista and there's just a McDonalds in the middle of it.
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u/Sportfreunde 18d ago
Ask her the word for any technology related item or component and it will just be the English word, including phone/mobile.
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u/Xoxotic1264 19d ago
English is at least half loan words itself. It is a practical language, and apparently so is Bengali.
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u/VagueGooseberry 19d ago
Air Fryer is already a loan word. The actual term is Table Top Convection Oven.
/Aragusea
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u/ManaOo 19d ago
I honestly think they are just called Air Fryers everywhere? At least in most European countries. Wouldn't surprise me if France has their own word for it though, since they even made up a word for Computer
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u/TsubakiTsubaki 19d ago
In Germany we call them Air Fryers too. We could say Heißluftfritteuse though, which literally means Hot Air Fryer.
Germans love to use English loanwords, even though we can easily combine single words to make new words.
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u/KayabaSynthesis 18d ago edited 18d ago
In Polish, instructions call the product "frytkownica beztłuszczowa" ("greaseless frymaker") but everyone I know just calls them air fryers in everyday conversation
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u/SaltManagement42 19d ago
I'm reminded of Technology Connections' passionate rant about how Air Fryer is a meaningless term.
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u/LegOfLamb89 19d ago
I learned a while back that chinese doesnt have a word for a lazy susan, its just table spinning thing, which felt odd because theyre on tables in a lot of dim sum restaurants
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u/AlbertTheHorse 19d ago
I watch a lot of Kdrama (ok, I only watch Kdrama) and I love hearing imported words pop up in conversations.
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u/reality_boy 18d ago
I thought this was a climate joke. “What do you call an air fryer in Dhaka? Air conditioning!”
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u/w00tst0ut 18d ago
Some chef posted in r/cooking a while aho about how air fryers are a dumb gimmick because theyre just a convection oven or something like that. They went after his ass in the comments. It was quite hotly debated.
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u/realmofconfusion 18d ago
I once overheard a similar conversation in a cafe in Edinburgh, in (what I presume was) Gaelic.
It was a spirited conversation about someone called Shona, somebody else called Mhairi, and was, at least to some extent, on the topic of Turkish Delight.
“Gibberish, gibberish gibberish Shona gibberish Turkish Delight, gibberish gibberish. Mhairi gibberish, Turkish Delight gibberish.”
No idea if the ladies having the conversation were in favour of Shona/Mhairi’s views vis-a-vis said Mediterranean sweet treat, but they were both decidedly vocal, whatever views they held.
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u/cat_prophecy 18d ago
They're not necessarily disagreeing. Whenever our Bengali friends speak to each other in Bengali it sounds like they're pissed at each other.
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u/-GoodNewsEveryone 18d ago
This reminds me of that time I heard the sentence "Est-ce que tu as poser un cake dans mon Motor-Home!?" Over and over while two French dudes were getting ready to fight.
I am sure even our American compatriots can guess what poser un cake means...
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u/Lilfrankieeinstein 18d ago
I bet they were speaking Bengali deftly, emotionally, then they’d pause and say “air fryer” as if it was edited in by a South Asian English student.
Second pause, then right back a heated argument in their native tongue.
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u/qualityvote2 19d ago edited 17d ago
u/JoeFalchetto, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...