I can say “Thank you” in 15 languages:
Thank you (English)
Gracias (Spanish)
Grazie (Italian)
Merci (French)
Obrigado (Portuguese)
Arigato (Japanese - ありがとう )
Farem nderet (Albanian)
Sheh sheh (Chinese - 謝謝 )
Tack (Swedish)
Tack (Norwegian)
Tak (Danish)
Dank u (Dutch)
Danke (German)
Spasebo (Russian - Cyrillic characters: спасибо )
Eucharisto (Greek - Greek characters: ευχαριστώ )
My accomplishment may sound impressive, but it pales into insignificance when you consider that the Ethnologue lists 7,102 languages spoken on planet Earth today.
Among the Creek and Seminole native American tribes of the southeastern U.S., “Big water” was not Gitchi Gumee but Okeechobee. How convenient, as it would have been embarrassing to Floridians to have to refer to Lake Okeechobee (which covers 730 square miles and has a maximum depth of 12 feet) as Lake Superior (which covers 31,400 square miles and has a maximum depth of 1,332 feet) . According to our old friend Wikipedia, the name Okeechobee comes from the Hitchiti words oki (water) and chubi (big) , but the oldest known name for the lake, reported by Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda in the 16th century, was -- would you believe it? -- Mayaimi (which also means -- I kid you not -- “big water”) .
Another Native American word I like is Apalachicola, which is not a carbonated beverage enjoyed by people living in the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia. It means “the people on the other side of the river” and could be used by people in Yorkshire and Lancashire to refer to one another if only the Pennines were a river instead of a mountain range.
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