how do you say email in german or french or italian or japanese ?

Question

how do you say "internet" in any of those languages - and is the internet going to be the first step to a worldwide language ? as new things are conceived or invented and the information about them is shared immediately with the world, will there be any reason to have more than one word for those items? or will everyone use the same word to refer to them ?

Answer 1

I more or less agree with wrf3k on German. I'd say that most German speakers would pronounce the "e" similar to the English pronunciation, though, and that the article used for "Internet" is the neuter "das" (similar to the German cognate to "net": "das Netz").

As far as your second language is concerned, I doubt it. Along with David Crystal (in his book "Language and the Internet", 2nd ed. 2006) I believe that from starting out as an almost exclusovely English language medium, the Internet has developed into a truly multilingual medium. The numbers support that. While in 1997 more than 82 percent of webpages were in English, the percentage of the world population that is online has been estimated at only 35.8 % for 2004.
see
http://global-reach.biz/globstats/index.php3

Answer 2

In Italian
internet = internet
e-mail = e-mail or posta elettronica
Internet sure is a big step about what you say, but press, radio, cinema and, even more, TV came first. Internet will do even more by that point of view, but not as a first step.

Answer 3

In German it is e-mail, but the e sounds more like an a. and Der Internet is internet, they make it easy over there.

Answer 4

In Japanese, email is either one of the following:
電子メール、E メール、電子郵便

Internet = インターネット
Direct translation from english.

Answer 5

in french we say couriel which is courrier(letter) and electronic in one word.