Why do some words in different languages have the same multiple meanings?

409 viewsOther

Take the English word “right”. It can mean “true, correct”, but it can also be used in something like “human rights”.

Now take the Arabic word حق. Again, it can mean “true, correct” and the “rights” in “human rights”.

It makes sense for a word to have the same single meaning across different languages. But what is the likeliness that two languages have a word that share the same multiple meanings?

In: Other

10 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Oftentimes, when words in different languages share meanings that wouldn’t have to be related, there is a conceptual connection based in the real world. This conceptual connection is often a result of each word’s etymology. (Etymology is the record of how the words have changed their meanings over time.)

A famous example is that in most human languages, a word meaning “soil” or “land” is used to refer to the third planet from the sun as a whole. English: Earth/earth; Finnish: Maa/maa; Turkish: Yer/yer; Arabic: al-ʔarḍ/ʔarḍ (الْأَرْض/أَرْض) (al- just means “the”); Mandarin: dìqiú/dì (地球/地) (qiú, 球 is just an extra word part meaning “globe” or “orb”).

We could’ve named Earth “the Ocean” or “the Droplet” or “the Cloudrock” or “Planet-Three”, without giving it a name connected to soil, but lots of people and lots of languages didn’t; because lots of cultures consider soil, land, to be an important and distinctive essence of what makes this world our home.

For the concept of “right” and “human rights”, the conceptual connection is that human rights (human legal protections) are codifications of the right (correct) way to treat someone. We legally protect a person’s right to be treated right. For example: English: rights/right; Finnish: oikeus/oikein; Turkish: hak/hak; Arabic: ḥaqq/ḥaqq (حَقّ/حَقّ).

Now in this case, if you look into the words, Mandarin uses a slightly different connection. Its word for a right in the sense of a human right is [quánlì](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%AC%8A%E5%88%A9) (權利). The first term, [quán](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%AC%8A) (權), means “power”, and the second term, [lì](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%88%A9) (利), means a benefit; so in Chinese, rights are “power-benefits”.

You are viewing 1 out of 10 answers, click here to view all answers.