Sometimes when I say danke (thanks or thank you) some of my friends will say (and the spelling is wrong but it's as close as I can get) they will say danata or maybe it's dinata.

andrewta@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 85 points –

I assumed they meant thanks but a Google search doesn’t give me that kind of result. What does dinata mean and what language is it from?

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de nada

Spanish phrase

de na·​da dā-ˈnä-t͟hä 

: of nothing : you're welcome

Or "bitteschön" in German.

Dunno how native speakers would do it, but usually I answer "bitte" for "danke", "bitte schön" for "danke schön".

Fun fact: saying "bitte" near my cat prompts her to rub her face on your leg. All the time. I speak in German with her, and when she obeys my commands I tell her "bitte" and pet her, so now she associated the word with being petted.

I would translate it more closely to 'keine Mühe'/'keine Ursache'

Do you happen to know why it's "keine Ursache"? That is a thing in Danish and Norwegian too ("ingen årsak") and I always thought it was a weird phrase.

Swedish too. I've always assumed the implicit meaning is roughly "there is [no reason] to thank me".

That makes sense. For some reason, I thought it was something like "no reason to do what I did". So basically "Sure, totally no ulterior motives here, by the way!", which seemed kinda weird to me.

Just as an additional tidbit, it's the same in Portuguese as well!

[Additional tidbit]

Pronunciation-wise it's typically different, although in a weird way - both languages allow some variation depending on the speaker's variety, but they don't coincide. For example in Portuguese you could get [dɨˑ'näðɐ̥ˑ], [de'nädɐ], [dʒi'nadɐ̥ˑ], depending on where the speaker is from, but AFAIK you won't find Spanish-like [ð] without a completely "un-Spanish-like" vowel reduction. In the meantime I kind of expect some Caribbean Spanish speakers to render the expression as [de'nää] de na'a.

Very good point, in hindsight I should probably have clarified I was focusing on the written form when I replied