Something to Contemplate

A comment by Baden on Cameron's blog recently has reminded me of something I've been meaning to write down before I forget. Baden mentioned that he liked asking people how they described animal noises in different languages. This reminded me of my mother's ongoing quest to learn how to say "belly-button" in as many languages as possible. I must admit that I've been known to help out at times.

So far we have:

English: navel
French: nombril (or, more formally, ombilic)
German: Bauchnabel
Greek: ὀμϕαλός (omphalos)
Hindi: sundi
Indonesian: pusar
Italian: ombelico
Javanese: udel
Latin: umbilicus
Malayalam: pokkil

I guess a straightforward word like that would be easy to look up in dictionaries, unlike Baden's onomatopoeia, but that would be cheating.