When someboday sneezes, do you usually say anything? If so, what?
In the UK it’s common to say ‘Bless you!’ after a sneeze.
In French they say à tes souhaits or à vos souhaits – souhait = wish, so these mean something like ‘to your wishes’.
In German they say “Gesundheit!” (Health). I’ve heard this used by English speakers as well.
The Welsh equivalents of ‘Bless you’ are:
– Rhad arnat ti! = Bless you! (to one person you know)
– Rhad arnoch chi! = Bless you! (to several people or a stranger)
– Bendith y Tad! = Blessing of the Father!
However I’ve never heard these used in Welsh.
How do you represent the sound of a sneeze writing?
Here are a few ways: achoo, atchoo, ahchoo, ah-choo, a-choo, atishoo, atchoum (French).
Here’s an infographic showing how people respond to a sneeze around the world:
How the world responds to sneezing, courtesy of Expedia.ca
In Gaelg (Manx Gaelic), we say “Bannaghtyn ort” (“Blessings on you”).
As an aside, ‘sneezing’ is ‘streighyraght’ and ‘hay fever’ is ”streighyraght houree’ – literally, ‘summer sneezing’.
I found the entry for Georgia curious since it lacked the Georgian script and more importantly since Georgian entirely lacks grammatical gender. The phrases listed appear to be in Chechen (at least according to cited source #22). Ironically, cited source #2 does in fact list the correct Georgian for the expression – იცოცხლე (albeit the transliteration is a little off, it should be ‘itsotskhle’). This would be singular/informal, while plural/formal should be იცოცხლეთ (itsotskhlet). The translation is essentially something along the lines of “keep on living”.