kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world 2 days ago
All of them are fingers. Thumbs are fingers, but a finger is not necessarily a thumb. I dont know where people get the idea that a thumb is not a finger. So many common sayings reinforce it. “Counting on your fingers (including your thumbs)”, healthy babies have “Five fingers, five toes”, “What did the five fingers say to the face… slap”, “high five”, “five finger discount”, etc. Also, honorable mention to Princess Bride’s Inigo Montoya searching for “the 6 fingered man” which includes his thumb. “Middle finger” is not the only thing that makes no sense if you don’t accept that the thumb is a finger.
rockerface@lemm.ee 1 day ago
In almost every other language there isn’t even a separate word for “thumb”, it’s just one of the fingers.
kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
I don’t think that’s right? I know polish has a separate word, and sampling in Google translate seems to show separate words in German, french and Spanish. Maybe I got lucky and hit the exceptions, but it seems to commonly be a separate word.
isyasad@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I only know Japanese, but it is 親指 (oya yubi) which means parent-finger.
rockerface@lemm.ee 1 day ago
Do other fingers get their own names in those languages, though? Or is thumb special, like in English?
kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Not sure about other languages, but in polish the thumb is “kciuk”, while the rest are variants on finger - “palec wskazujący”, “palec środkowy”