And. A word that never appears alone. Always preceded by something, and followed by something. Although it may sometimes start a sentence. But always loaded with promise and hope of continuation.

So a very positive word, right? Which by itself doesn’t mean a thing. We’ll, of course it can be involved in a list of sinister things as well.

And was also the first foreign word that I learned. We kids always walked to school, situated a couple of miles from our home. But anytime we would go to the city, not owning a car, we always got to take the bus, to our mutual delight.

Riding the bus was pretty rare though, a special event. As soon as I started learning how to read, I made sure to pay special attention to the different signs and posters in the bus. It made the bus ride that much more fun, too.

Some of the words in those posters seemed familiar. But not necessarily easy to read if the words were too long as they sometimes are in the Finnish language. But one day one word stood out the minute I laid my eyes on it. For it contained a letter combination that was impossible in my mother tongue and didn’t make any sense whatsoever. It was the word “och”.

Later that day I found out that “och” meant “and” in Swedish. I had learned my first foreign word, and was so proud of myself. Talk about the small joys of life! But it started a lifelong quest for language skills.

So here is a list of ands in different languages, à la Journeys of Life:

a (Czech and Hawaiian)
agus (Gaelic)
and (English)
e (Italian and Portuguese)
és (Hungarian)
et (Latin and French)
gwa (Korean) 과
hé (Chinese) 和
i (Croatian, Polish and Russian)
ja (Finnish and Estonian)
ke (Greek) και
læa (Thai) และ
ma (Samoan)
na (Swahili)
och (Swedish)
og (Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic)
soshite (Japanese) そして
und (German)
ve (Turkish)
y (Spanish)