2724: No Toe? Jun 5, 2024

It might seem natural to have separate words for fingers and toes, but this is not so common everywhere. In fact, through Europe and Western Asia, it is pretty neatly divided that Uralic languages (i.e. Finnish, Estonian, & Hungarian) and Germanic languages have words for toes, except for Yiddish where the term is פינגער פונ פוס (finger fun fus) meaning “finger of the foot”. That means that other Indo-European languages like the Romance and Slavic branches, as well as Semitic and Turkic languages etc. basically use a word that would be better translated as ‘digit’. 

Looking around the globe as well, the trend roughly continues in Asia etc. where having a distinct word for ‘toe’ is not a given and does not appear in many of the languages of Southeast Asia like Thai and Indonesian, but is present in ones located further north.