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Comment by Delk

Robot intuitively sounds like it could be a good candidate.

I don't think "computer" is quite that universal, though. AFAIK it's something else at least in French ("ordinateur"), Swedish ("dator"), Norwegian ("datamaskin"), Finnish ("tietokone"; lit. "knowledge/data machine") and Estonian ("arvuti"). I think Chinese has its own unrelated word, too. And about half of the African languages that I can easily check in Wikipedia have words that aren't at least immediately recognisable as related to the English word.

It's a commonly shared loan word but it doesn't seem to be quite that close to being shared by (nearly) all languages.

edit: added translations for the examples

parent Delk 3 years ago

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