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Just what is basketball called in various
countries and in world languages
First the variants of the word
"basketball" itself:
Basketball -- in English, German, Danish, Norwegian
Basketbal -- in Dutch, Czech, Slovak and Afrikaans (losing an 'l')
Basket-ball -- in French (gaining a dash, oh these sophisticated French...)
Basketboll -- in Swedish and Albanian (gaining an 'o')
Basketbol -- in Tagalog and Turkish (losing an 'l' again)
Basketbols -- in Latvian (gaining another 's')
Basquetebol -- in Portuguese (with a 'q' and an extra 'e')
Basketbalo -- in Esperanto (an International Auxiliary Language)
Baschet -- in Romanian (gaining a 'ch')
Bàsquet -- in Catalan (gaining an exotic accent grave)
Bola Basket -- in Indonesian (just shuffling the two halfs around)
Some nations have given it altogether a different name:
Pallacanestro -- in Italian (so romantic...)
Baloncesto -- in Spanish (equally pretty...)
Saskibaloia -- in Basque language (even prettier)
Koripallo -- in Finnish (as warm as can be...)
Körfuknattleikur -- in Icelandic (a mouthful!)
Korvpall -- in Estonian (so musical)
Krepinis -- in Lithuanian (even more musical)
Korpval -- in Estonian
Koszykówka -- in Polish (that's what Pope John Paul calls it...)
Koarka -- in Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian and Bosnian (they know their game, don't they?)
Kosárlabda -- in Hungarian (an improvement on the kosarka name)
Kinipopo Hina'i -- in Hawaiian (I wish I were there...)
Kwalon kwando -- in Hausa...and
...Ball agbon -- in Yoruba
...(so no wonder why the Nigerians excel in the game so much everywhere they
go...)
Korbopilko -- in Esperanto which honors the game with two names
--korbopilko but also basketbalo a variant on basketball
Basketball also written in various fascinating character sets
(sorry if they may come out illegible on your PCs...):
Баскетбол -- in Cyrillic letters as in Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian
Μπάσκετ -- in Cyrillic as in Greek (see the extra 'm' to pronounce the 'b')
سلة
كرة -- in Arabic (transliteration 'kourat es sallah')
籃球 -- in Chinese (traditional) and Taiwanese (transliteration
na/giu)
バスケットボール -- in Japanese
농구 -- in Korean
บาสเกตบอล -- in
Thai
I would appreciate very much that you send me further variations of the name so
that we can add them to this list of beautiful basketball names, music to my
ears.
E-mail us
at:
info@internationalbasketball.com
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