Round one: Meuf vs 秋田犬, akitaken
(poll at the end)
Meuf (French, verlan version)
[mœf]
Translation: "Girl", as in "girls and guys" not "girls and boys", though it's originally derived from "femme", the word for "woman". Used a lot as an interjection or expletive.
French is an Indo-European language belonging to the Romance branch originating in France, where it has 64 million speakers and is the national language. However, due to colonialism and historical popularity in Europe (language spread due to cultural, scientific and philosophical dominance and stayed an important lingua franca), French has almost 310 million speakers worldwide, although only 80 million speak it as their first language. Verlan is a specific type of French slang, in which one splits the pronounced word into two and switch their places. The word verlan is an example of this, being derived from “l’envers” which means in reverse.
Motivation: It's one of the most common and timeless words in verlan. It's a fun word because you can see in the process of being put backwards, the spelling went unrecognizable due to pronunciation being prioritized, which I think is an incredibly cool feature of slang, changing the language like that. It's also incredibly commonly used and adds a very useful nuance to the gendered words of this language, sort of an inbetween that both means girl and woman. Can also mean "girlfriend" which is useful because both "fille" and "femme" are respectively the words for "girl/daughter" and "woman/wife", but whereas "homme" doesn't mean "man/husband" and "garçon" doesn't mean "boy/son", there's "mec", the masculine equivalent of "meuf", that does mean both "guy" and "boyfriend", so pour one out for gender equality. It's also a fun word to call people like, girl what. meuf what. 10/10, common word, often overlooked, but so useful.
秋田犬, akitaken (Japanese)
[a̠kʲita̠kẽ̞ɴ]
Translation: An Akita dog
Japanese is spoken by 122 million people in Japan and around 1,5 million people outside of Japan. It used to be considered an isolate, a language related to no other languages, but not anymore. Linguists have found enough difference between Japanese and what used to be considered dialects of Japanese to classify them as their own languages. So now it’s part of the Japonic language family, together with 16 other languages spoken in Japan. Another interesting thing about Japanese is that it has three different scripts.
Motivation: Akita dogs are just very very cute. They're similar looking to Shiba Inus, but bigger. They were used as hunting dogs!
Which is the best word?
Meuf
秋田犬, akitaken
