And

Guest   Thu Nov 01, 2007 9:36 am GMT
How do you say AND in your language? Does it exist in all languages?

I especially want to compare similars between families of languages?

Germanic:
English: and
German: und


Romance:
Spanish: y
French: et
Italian: e

Slavic:
Russian: и

Add more.
olaszinho   Thu Nov 01, 2007 10:37 am GMT
Spanish y and e
italian e and ed
hungarian és
portuguese e
My spam is better than yo   Thu Nov 01, 2007 11:09 am GMT
Romance:
Spanish: y, e
French: et
Italian: e, ed
Portuguese: e
Catalan: i
Occitan: e
furrykef   Thu Nov 01, 2007 1:44 pm GMT
There's more than one kind of "and". There's the "and" that joins items in a list ("food and drink"), and there's the "and" that joins clauses together ("I did this, and I did that"). In many languages, these are the same, but in some they are not.

Japanese's system draws more distinctions than that, too. XとY (where と is pronounced "to", like the English word "toe") means "X and Y, and nothing else". XやY ("X ya Y") means "X and Y and other things".

To join clauses together with "and", Japanese uses "keredo", but not in every case. Here's a sentence that doesn't: "Ginza e itte, kaimono o shite, uchi e kaerimashita." Translated word for word into English (with word order changed to be comprehensible), this would be something like, "Going to Ginza, doing shopping, returned home." And in plain English, "I went to Ginza, did some shopping, and returned home." In the Japanese, the gerund forms are used for the first two verbs and only the last is inflected for tense, and this indicates a sequence of actions without needing a word for "and".

- Kef
guest   Thu Nov 01, 2007 2:15 pm GMT
Scots: an
Frisian: en
Plattdeutsch: un
Dutch: en

Swedish: och
Norwegian: og
Danish: og
Icelandic: og

Serbian: a; i

Korean: -gwa (added to the stem of nouns); -go (added to verbs to indicate "and")
Guest   Thu Nov 01, 2007 2:33 pm GMT
Serbian: a; i

Russian a; i
Most slavic languages have these two forms
Travis   Thu Nov 01, 2007 2:56 pm GMT
>>Scots: an
Frisian: en
Plattdeutsch: un
Dutch: en<<

Mind you that in everyday speech, English "and" is actually quite close to the above, as it is usual to omit the final /d/ outside careful speech.