• NeuronautML@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Mango doesn’t exist in Portuguese. It’s written manga, a feminine gendered word, Portuguese being a gendered language.

    Plural mangas. Doesn’t really help, but there’s your linguistic TIL.

    • radix@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      My bad. Yeah, it’s interesting that we don’t seem to know why English calls it “mango” when every other language calls it “manga” or something else ending with the “-a”.

      • NeuronautML@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        A lot of words in English are mispronounced/misheard/misunderstood words of things that people from the UK didn’t recognize during their exploration eras, so they asked the locals and that’s what they told everyone it was. Eventually Aussies and Americans inherited these “mistakes”.

        By the time the error was found out everyone was calling it by the wrong name already, so it kinda stuck. Hell i speak Portuguese and when i speak in English i tend to say mangoes instead of mangas, even though the word mango came from the language i speak.