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Tuesday, May 26, 2020

How to learn to say mother in many langagues

Some words are the same in several languages. If you can identify a few simple words in another language it gets you started and you are encouraged to continue, even in a language which seems difficult.

On the Facebook Polyglots page you often gets asked, what is such and such a word in your language.

Lets look at Mother or Mum.

You have to be careful with translate google because sometimes it translates the word mum as in the verb to keep mum. So you see the translation include silent.

To prevent this mis-translation, I tried translating Mom or mummy.  These are the results for mother, starting with those I remembered, amplified by adding others from frequently used languages.

1 Ma (Chinese) 

Mum
mom
or
mom

It is the same sound in Urdu. Although I cannot read the writing, I played the sound in Google translate.
ماں



2 Ima (Hebrew) 
(The middle letter in the Hebrew lettering is M. The vowels are not shown but would be written in handwriting under or over the placeholder letter.)

mother

3 Mama (Italian) 
Also mama in Maori
Also mama in Serbian
Also mama in Solvenian
Also mama in Swahili
also Mama in Ukrainian

Spanish

Mother
If you go to google translate and click on the sound symbol you will hear that the accent is on the second syllable.



4 Mum / Mummy (UK) 

5 Mom (USA), 

6 mater in Latin and 

7 mother in German 

8 Mamma in Dutch
mamma in Norwegian
mamma in Swedish

9 Mom in Filipino

10 Scottish Gaelic Mam

11 Tamil


Mother

Am'mā



12

In Thai


mother

Mae
it sounds like mare elongated or meh-er

13 Welsh for Mum or Mummy is Mam.

14 yiddish
Mummy
Mummy
mami

Reading from the right to the left, even with only an elementary knowledge of Russian/Bulgarian/Cyrrillic derived from Greek derived from Hebrew, you see the letter M a bit like a McDonalds arch, the vowel Uh is a line under the placeholder, and the ee is just an apostrophe in the air on its own like the dot over an i,
 .


and so on.

If there is any question you want to ask about languages, you can ask on the Facebook polyglot page.

To translate individual words or sections, use Google translate.
You can also read Wikiedia in another language. 

Or try a tourist board page. Many of them have tiny flags to click on which turn the page's text into another language.

To learn a language, try Duolingo.
Or Memrise.

Useful Websites

Facebook polyglots
https://www.facebook.com/groups/polygotcommunity/
translate google

About the Author
I and my family have lived in the UK, Spain, the USA and Singapore. I am a trave writer and phtographer and teacher of English A level and English as a foreign language.

Please come to a Toastmasters International Club where the English clubs have a langauge evaluator or grammarian.  We also have French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Tamil and clubs based in Singapore and many more online around the world which because of Covid-19 are now meeting online.

I am President of Braddell Heights Advanced, meeting every Wednesday, on zoom the first Wednesday of the month but the other wednesdays are workshops on app learncool.sg
Or quicker, tinyurl.com/BHACOOL
In Singapore we are on the same time zone as Malaysia, Hong Kong, and China (Beijing and Shanghai).
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