Hungarian here, we’re in the “fingers of the feet” group!
Why is this a map? Some of these countries have multiple languages, like Switzerland, Belgium, Ireland, Wales, even Spain has Catalonian.
In catalán it’s “dits del peu”, so the same as in spanish. There is no equivalent to toe.
Engagement shitposting
False, italian has a word for toe that is separate from the fingers of the feet (alluce)
That is specifically the name for the big toe though, and while there are names for the various other toes (they’re quite uncommon, I don’t remember them), they’re not generic like “toe”
No, only alluce is a real word. The other names seems to be made up just to make a funny story.
Source: https://accademiadellacrusca.it/it/consulenza/i-nomi-delle-dita-dei-piedi/1119
in French, les orteils but also plenty of slang: les nougats, les arpions, les radis, les haricots…
Well we definitely have both, we do also say “doigts de pied”.
We have a word for toe, and we don’t use it very much.
In Polish, “ręka” can mean both arm and hand and which one it is is context dependent
Well, there’s “dłoń” for hand. “Ręka” means the whole arm, including the hand, I assume.
In Bulgarian “длан” [dɫan] (which in IPA is spelled close enough to “dłoń”] refers specifically to the palm while “ръка” [rɤˈka] can refer to the the hand, whole arm and some people may use it for palm even, although that last one is not correct.
Dłoń means something more like palm
Kinda same in Slovenian. You don’t shake hands, you shake arms. Anything you do with your hands is done with your arms. The word for hand is not used that often.
Are there jerk off jokes about someone’s arm being their lover instead of their hand?
Yes. “Do poroke na roke” is one meaning until your wedding you get it done by hand
This unites the Germanic and Uralic languages in by far the most important cultural way.
In certain Austroasiatic languages, your wrists and ankles are your hand-necks and foot-necks.
In hungarian we have a similar thing but for your foot and hand, its leg-head and arm-head respectively.
I don’t know much about it, but I suspect this is not far off from being just a map of the 'Germanic" language family.
Not quite. Green countries are germanic or uralic (finnish, estonian, hungarian). I assume each country is only represented by a single language on the map, and Ireland is probably assumed to be speaking English according to this map.
Ah excellent, thank you.
I think the numbers speaking Irish Gaelic are incredibly small, whereas Welsh is still a commonly spoken first language away from south Wales.
I looked up the welsh for toes and found toesau which is a Welsh pluralised borrow from English, but also bysedd traed, which is indeed fingers of the foot, so I think Wales should be added to the stripey red and green part of the map as per other comments.
So the Flemish part of Belgium has “tenen”, which is not toefinger. The french have “orteils”, which is also not fingers of the foot( finger is doigt ).
So the map is at least wrong for those two countries.
Are you really telling me that cookie clicker was made by a french toe?
yes.
You can also use “doigts de pied” in French, so you can be whichever colour you like.
Real funny they coloured it differently, because Flanders literally shares a language with The Netherlands.
To be fair half the world seems to forget Belgium is not all french sometimes, or puts french as the default even though Flanders’ population is almost twice as large as Wallonie. Even adding the population of Brussels and Wallonie, Flanders still has the larger population. (Numbers for stats come from statbel)
To be fair half the world seems to forget Belgium is not all french sometimes
It’s annoying as fuck.
Microsoft/Xbox store used to be almost entirely French when visiting from a Belgian IP, even if you set your profile language to Dutch or English. Not sure how it is nowadays, I don’t come there anymore, but it was like that for at least a decade.
Amazon Prime and Netflix still have many movies and series in dubbed French only for Belgian customers, and not the original version with Dutch or even just English subtitles.
Many sites serve you a French language page by default if you visit from a Belgian IP, and then you have to hunt in the header or footer of the page for the language toggle. You usually can’t even read the cookie permission popup in a language you understand.
Either way if you ignore regional languages you’re not doing linguistics. And the author could not even get it right for national languages, if we even accept that arbitrarily picking one makes any sense.
This map is a masterclass in what not to do and it almost feels like intentional engagement farming.
Now do one for who has a word for “glove” vs “hand shoe”.
German Word for mittens is Fäustlinge, literally fistlings.
Okay but that’s kinda adorable
Byt then you also have Handschuhe (I bet I typed that wrong)
Handschuhe ist korrekt. Perfekte Rechtschreibung. Gratuliere.
Danke. Ich hatte Deutsch für viele Jahren studiert aber ich habe es nicht für sieben Jahren spricht.
The grammar I think I could still do decently, just a lot of the words have escaped from my mind.
Germany not calling them “feet fingers” was unexpected.
I’m wondering if they got France and Germany mixed up. I don’t remember all the French I was taught growing up, but it didn’t sound right. So I googled it and got “droigts” and “orteils” for “fingers” and “toes”.
or fingersAtTheEndOfTheFeetNotToBeConfusedWithTheOnesOnTheHands
German has “Finger” and “Zehen”
Yes, but why do we say “Fußzeh” there aren’t any other “Zehen” on the body, right?
I don’t think I have ever heared anyone say “Fußzeh”. Maybe it’s regional?
Yeah I’ve heard it before and I usually brought up that exact same argument, the fuck kinda other toes do we have lol
But I wouldn’t say it’s common or widespread, at least from my experience
Never heard or said “Fußzeh” before.
Heard it first after moving to the South, it’s absolutely regional.
Like saying dreiviertel Elf for 10:45 or Teppich for Decke or Fuß for the entire leg.
Wait until you go even further south and every receptacle that can hold liquids is “kübel”.
Both “orteils” and “doigts de pied” are used in French, the former sounding less childish than the latter.
The same language where ninety-two is “four twenties and a twelve”?
Just four twenty twelve, that’s enough. We’re not savages.
It’s almost twice as many characters, but only one more syllable. It feels so long counting it out :)
of course, english has a lot going on that’s unreasonable as well so …
Ninety two is nine ten two anyway, it’s not that far off. In fact french and Basque at least do have a word for twenty, english doesn’t.
Twenty is rebranded two ten.
Thirty is third ten.
And so on.
The other word for twenty in English is score. Pretty rarely used, however.
It’s fucking far off. I can’t stress how bonkers your number naming is. I speak two romance languages and two Germanic ones, and I’ll not try French because this and many other bullshittery.
I think you’re allowing this to make you angrier than you should.
You clearly speak English, which I think of as the mongrel child of two or three Germanic languages and a Romance one, and not in a good way, so I also think it’s the most fucked up and inconsistent one of the lot. The only thing it’s got going for it as a language is genderless nouns.
Not angry at all, thank you for the concern.
And yeah, English is terrible, the absolute divorce between writing and speaking being the most salient point for me. But it’s the lingua franca, you can’t not speak it if you want to interact in the world stage. But, for all its faults, I’m glad it replaced French in this role.
French took it’s number system from Basque, which is at least more consistent since iirc in French 70 is 60+10 while the consistent logic should be 3*20+10.
Anyway, you say that twenty is far from twenty ->twen ten->second ten. 70 in Basque is hirurogeitahamar->hirur hogei ta hamar->hirugarren (third) hogei(twenty) eta(and) hamar(ten). It’s the same logic.
The only reason you say it’s bonkers is because you don’t understand. Different = wrong. Lmao.
Also, don’t fucking say that french is my language, I’m Basque Spaniard.
Also, as the other commenter said, we are speaking English, do you understand how insane of a language it is? It’s a Frankenstein of several languages where words were imported while keeping the pronunciation, so there’s no fucking logic as to how you are to say things.
How do you said “read”? No that’s wrong, I meant the past tense. Oh, it needs context?
How do you say entrepreneur? Why are you saying it in French? Fuck logic.
In Spanish you are able to pronounce correctly any word you read for the first time because the rules it has define strict pronunciation. Same for Basque, the only thing you might do wrong is intonation but most of the time it’s the second syllable. It’s fucking crazy that you both need to learn a word and how it’s pronounced in english, for every word.
Oh, extra edit. If the Basque/French counting system makes the language too hard don’t touch spoken Chinese lmao, intonation changes completely words way more frequently than Papa/papá.
Ad hominem.
Congratulations. You’ve just discovered how base 10 counting works.
Not really. We are talking about how numbers are called in different languages. Other languages have actual names for twenty that aren’t a combination of digit+ten.
Basque is hogei, ten is hamar, two is bi, there is no phonetic similarity. The way language is created then informs how counting and numbers work.
Spanish has a proper distinct name for 20, but then is like english for 30 and above.
No need to be so passive aggressive while not understanding what I was trying to explain.
I’m not being passive at all.
First off, the remark about French and 92 is a jab at French in particular. No other romance language for some reason stalls out at 70 and cobbles together the 80s and 90s. There is a modern word, IIRC “neufant” or something that’s closer to “nine tens.”
To your point, base 10 counting, which we use because of how many fingers our species has. Whether we use base 8, 10, 12, etc. counting, the fact remains that all counting uses incremental increases like base 10.
9 rolls over to 1 unit in the 10s column. 19 rolls over to 2 units in the 10s column.
So if we say “4 x 20” instead of 80, were suddenly creating a second, nested, base 20 counting system (confusingly, using base 10 numbers!) within our usual base 10 system. So it’s the same in the sense that we are using numbers in general, but different in that it anchors the counting base in a weird way.
Let’s say I run a restaraunt and make omlettes. I can make a 2 egg, 3 egg, or 4 egg omlette for you. But the 4 egg omlette is tiny. Why? Because for the 4 egg omlette I use quail eggs. But only for the 4 and 5 egg omlettes. Order a 6 egg omlette and you’re getting a half dozen chicken eggs in some 100 square meter omlette. Multiples of 4 and 5, always quail eggs. It’s sort of like that.
Language maps shouldn’t be country maps, as language boundaries rarely overlap country borders. And it’s also wrong, in Hungarian toe is “lábujj” literally means “footfinger”
I suspected it was rage bait, starting with the British isles being coloured green, despite the existence of the word ‘toe’ there.
By that logic, it should be both green and red, because it looks like “lábujj” is both a word, and like you said it means “footfinger”.
Sociocultural boundaries are almost entirely grounded in language. Nation states are almost entirely grounded in imagination.
Reminds of a great lyric from the song “…Meltdown” by Enter Shikari:
Countries are just lines drawn in the sand with a stick
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Nope. In portuguese we do not call the toes “fingers of the feet”. In fact we do not have a word for fingers. Or toes.
What we have instead is a word for those little appendages that one can find at the end of one’s arms or legs. We call them “dedos”. Most of the time we do not feel the need to specify if we are talking about fingers or toes. Context is usually enough to distinguish between the two. But when do have to be specific, we call the fingers “dedos of the hands” and the toes “dedos of the feet”.
Now, that may seem weird to some, but to me what is really surprising is that some languages found it necessary to use two words to describe what is essentially the same fucking shit.
what is essentially the same fucking shit.
?
You stubbed your finger?
In portuguese? Absolutely! In english, not so much.
As someone who only speaks English, the cognitive map made by that language is kind of disgusted to think of toes and fingers interchangably.
Fingers are (or should be) clean, and are allowed to touch many things. I am perfectly comfortable touching many things with my fingers that other people’s fingers have touched.
But toes? Toes are gross. They are not interchangeable with fingers. Unless I’m in the shower cleaning my toes, if my fingers touch my toes I probably need to wash my hands after. And other people’s toes?..
No - toes and fingers are not the same thing. My toes are great, I’m glad to have them for balance while walking or running. But they are not fingers, or vis versa
“Digits” would be the English equivalent of “dedos”, and the words are indeed related.
Now, that may seem weird to some, but to me what is really surprising is that some languages found it necessary to use two words to describe what is essentially the same fucking shit.
Sucking on fingers is an entirely different kink from sucking on toes. So somewhat different I suppose.
to me what is really surprising is that some languages found it necessary to use two words to describe what is essentially the same fucking shit.
I mean, you can start calling all sorts of body parts the same shit, and some of them even have words already. Like we say arms and legs, but we could also say upper and lower limbs. We’ve got knees and elbows and shoulders, but they’re all just joints.
Now I’m wondering what languages have the fewest words that could describe the entire body, as in once you break down the word “body” into any number of parts (without using the word “body”, like upper and lower body), how many other words are needed? I think in English you couldn’t get away with anything less than head, neck, torso, and extremities (although one might argue that the latter refers only to hands and feet so you’d have to put limbs back in as well).
Torso and appendages
Head/neck being an appendage is arguable. But basically because there are better words to describe it, not because it isn’t one.
Axial and appendicular
Huh what? Dedos are fingers. And we say “dedos dos pés”.
You said “nope” then wrote a paragraph of text to confirm what you just tried to deny.
But we also say “dedos das mãos”, don’t we? A lot, in fact. You are not seriously trying to convince me that you are portuguese but you do not know this, are you?
“Dedos” can be used for hands and feet. Fingers are exclusively used to describe the digits of the hands. That’s my point.
Also, I wrote 3 paragraphs. Learn to count and learn to read.
But we also say “dedos das mãos”, don’t we? A lot, in fact.
Absolutely not. If I come running saying “ah meu deus, quebrei o dedo” you’d immediately assume fingers, not toes, if I meant toes I would specify, otherwise fingers are the default. I don’t think I can even recall a scenario of specifying “dedos das mãos” except for some kind of medical talk or children’s play or something like that.
that you are portuguese
I’m brazilian.
“Dedos” can be used for hands and feet.
Sure, which means just like the map implied we use “fingers of the feet” to say “dedos dos pés” and we don’t have a specific word for it. Thanks for confirming my (and OP’s) point you tried to deny.
Also, I wrote 3 paragraphs. Learn to count and learn to read.
You’re very angry for somebody disproving their own argument one comment later.
Sooo… “nubbins”?
(German “Nubsis” comes to mind as well)
thats the most adorable little word owo
It’s the same in spanish
Belgium is in wrong color
No trolling of Wallonia please.
wallifornia
dirty south from belgium, wah wah wah
I am the pope of dope!
