Friday 1 February 2008

The words for "bee" and "honey" in many languages

I have been meaning to put this together for some time - a list of two of my favourite words (bee and honey)in a lot of different languages. The choice of the two words in question relates not only to my liking of the animals and the foodstuff, but also because I suspect that a very large proportion of the population of the Earth has words for this items, and that they tend not to be borrowed words i.e. the words are likely to be old and already in use in each culture and therefore unlikely to be imported from another language in order to describe something otherwise indescribable. This hypothesis may prove to be completely false. After all, I am only a hobbyist in languages and have no idea of the actual linguistics behind such a theory. Anyway, I'll be filling them in as time goes on as comments to this post, mainly because I can't think of any better way of doing it!

7 comments:

jakubukaj said...

Slovak
včela
med

jakubukaj said...

Arabic
نَحْلَـه، نَحْـل
Czech
včela
Danish
bi
Dutch
bij
Estonian
mesilane
Finnish
mehiläinen
French
abeille
German
die Biene
Greek
μέλισσα
Hungarian
méh
Icelandic
bÿfluga
Indonesian
lebah
Italian
ape
Latvian
bite
Lithuanian
bitė
Norwegian
bie
Polish
pszczoła
Portuguese
abelha
Romanian
albină
Russian
пчела
Slovak
včela
Slovenian
čebela
Spanish
abeja
Swedish
bi
Turkish
arı

jakubukaj said...

Now... how to get those Korean, Chinese and Japanese fonts to display correctly?!

jakubukaj said...

Arabic
عَسَل
Czech
med
Danish
honning
Dutch
honing
Estonian
mesi
Finnish
hunaja
French
miel
German
der Honig
Greek
μέλι
Hungarian
méz
Icelandic
hunang
Indonesian
madu
Italian
miele
Latvian
medus
Lithuanian
medus
Norwegian
honning
Polish
miód
Portuguese
mel
Romanian
miere
Russian
мёд
Slovak
med
Slovenian
med
Spanish
miel
Swedish
honung
Turkish
bal

jakubukaj said...

p/f, b/m, l/w

jakubukaj said...

Euskera (Basque)
bee - erle
honey - ezti

Anonymous said...

This is a great list! Thanks for compiling it!