Hungarian here, we’re in the “fingers of the feet” group!
Hungary calls them foot fingers, should be red
Why is this a map? Some of these countries have multiple languages, like Switzerland, Belgium, Ireland, Wales, even Spain has Catalonian.
Engagement shitposting
No one can say this isn’t the place for it.
Perfect place. Where the rules are made up and upvotes don’t matter!
In catalán it’s “dits del peu”, so the same as in spanish. There is no equivalent to toe.
So, feet fingers, or “feengers”?
i always use this as an example of how deeply the languages we use shape how we understand the world
even the answer to the question “how many fingers do you have?” changes depending on the language, and that’s a physical fact that seems to not have any degree of subjectivity to it
Eight. A thumb is not a finger.
Depends on your definition. Wikipedia is either ambivalent about it, or lists the thumb as a finger.
In Dutch, thumbs are fingers, and there’s word for “digit” in the context of fingers and toes.
What is it then, a leg? That’s dumb.
This unites the Germanic and Uralic languages in by far the most important cultural way.
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.
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)
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.
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.
For real yeah, like it’s gotta be some default in an internationalisation library. It’s way too common on websites for that not to be the case.
Are you really telling me that cookie clicker was made by a french toe?
yes.
Belgium is in wrong color
No trolling of Wallonia please.
wallifornia
dirty south from belgium, wah wah wah
I am the pope of dope!
hungary is the wrong colour too: “lábujj” lit. “footfinger”. more confusingly, the middle is “lábfej”, which is “foothead”
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
Interesting read, thanks! I’d be curious to see if in 100 years they will become common enough to be considered “real words”, or if they will disappear, who knows
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
I just can’t get over how in Japanese, 足 means from like thigh, all the way down to tippy toes. Drives me nuts.
At least they usually use 脚 for leg and 足 for foot, even if they’re homophones.
I have a proposal:
Is your proposal that you wanna clink 2 coffee cups with steam coming off the top together?
No?
Edit: fine, make the thumb sideways.
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French supports both designation.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
German has “Finger” and “Zehen”
Yes, but why do we say “Fußzeh” there aren’t any other “Zehen” on the body, right?
Never heard or said “Fußzeh” before.
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
or fingersAtTheEndOfTheFeetNotToBeConfusedWithTheOnesOnTheHands
