A Foreign Language Vocabulary Thread: In Which We Look For Things That Have A Different, Non-Cognate Name in English/French/Spanish/German.

Maybe we'll throw in Italian too.

Always kind of surprised by this, although I only have found a few.

you really gonna make me google "non-cognate" on a sunday afternoon?

Sorry, skot. Took me years to start this thread because I couldn't think of a non-awkward way to title it and I still haven't.

First one is

English: the shark
French: le requin
Spanish: el tiburón
German: der Haifisch
Italian: lo squalo

Second one is:

English: the butterfly
French: le papillon
Spanish: la mariposa
German: der Schmetterling
Italian: la farfalla

rabbit / lapin / kaninchen / conejo (although the italian is similar)

Finding words that are non-cognate in all these languages at once will be tough.

scott, cognates are words that clearly and obviously share the same root and a common structure, such as incredible (en) and incroyable (fr). Non-cognates would be words like god (en) and dei (fr) which don't.

english: squirrel
spanish: ardilla
french: écureuil
german: dichhörnchen
dutch: eekhoorn
italian: scoiattolo

yah, got it on the cognate. my brain is cobwebby.

did i do it right?

^^^i sense maria lurking

Yes, thanks, guys, great work. But as far as "rabbit," which I had thought of before but forgotten, aren't "conejo" and "Kaninchen" related? Also, skot, did you do that yourself or did it come from Maria? (ha, xp)

I wanted this to be the third one, but I don't think it works
English: the bat
French: le chauve-souri
Spanish: el murciélago
German: die Fledermaus
Italian: il pipistrello

The middle three mean, "the bald mouse," "the blind mouse," and "the flying mouse," which might work except the "mur" in "murciélago" seems to be related to the "Maus" in Fledermaus.

English: the butterfly
French: le papillon
Spanish: la mariposa
German: der Schmetterling
Italian: la farfalla

interesting etymology of 'butterfly' in different languages. bowtie pasta is "farfalle" in Italian.

kaninchen seems to be from the latin too

some of this is probably because there were different vulgar/classical names like equus and caballus

ego sum mercator

grumio est in villa

"Squirrel" doesn't quite work because it is related to "écureuil"

Dang, I knew i would mess up a gender and some spelling it is "la chauve-souris

us i o um o i orum is os is

a ae ae am a ae arum is as is

Bat was the first I thought of, but yeah, it seems that it's not quite there.

maria suggested it! but i looked them up!

English: Wagtail
French: Bergeronnette
German: Bachstelze
Spanish: Aguzanieves
Italian: Ballerina

I think that works.

interesting etymology of 'butterfly' in different languages. bowtie pasta is "farfalle" in Italian.
otm. Always liked this word for 'butterfly'

sommerfugl Norwegian
“summerfly” (or is it “summerbird,” as a German “Vogel”” = “bird“?)

No that was a different kind of pasta.

Don't think I ever heard of a wagtail, but that looks like a keeper. I see some other words listed in the Italian dictionary but even so none look anything like anything else.

I think I've got another that I've finally found this weekend, but I've gotta go do something right this second. Sorry for the suspense.

english: offal
french: abats
german: innereien
spanish: menudencias
italian: frattaglie
romanian măruntaie
greek: entósthia
swedish: slaktbiprodukter

english word offal probably comes from the dutch word afval.

i did that one all by myself!

you really gonna make me google "non-cognate" on a sunday afternoon?

― scott seward, Sunday, February 24, 2013 2:40 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

little-known original line in the Rascals' "Groovin'".

offal in hebrew: psolet

he second fact might have helped Wolf Blitzer lessen his defeat against Andy Richter on "Jeopardy!"

walked, at shoulder, down the street, you weenie

you couldn't tell penne from fetuccini

do you think there's a cutoff date when no newer words can have this property?

I think it's interesting that animal names in particular seem resistant to Latinization. (Is this true of flora, too?) Maybe because they were important words to rural/agricultural life, where people remained illiterate for centuries after the spread of Romance languages?

English: grouse
French: lagopède
Spanish: urogallo
German: Meckern

& Italian: tetraonidi

But as far as "rabbit," which I had thought of before but forgotten, aren't "conejo" and "Kaninchen" related?

Yep. English has a cognate for this as well, which is "coney". So bear in mind that if you're looking to find something with no cognates in those five languages, you have to be aware of related terms. A bit of semantic drift in cognates is to be expected.

does 'pimp' work?
I don't trust google translate -- i thought pimp was 'mec' but it says 'souteneur'

Thought "mec" was just slang for "guy," originally from Arabic, I think. Think the the word you want is "maquereau," which also means "mackerel."

If I could cheat by swapping French for Finnish and Polish, the word for "German" works here:

English: German
Spanish: alemán
German: Deutsch
Italian: tedesco
Polish: Niemiecki
Finnish: Saksa

If "mec" isn't slangy enough you can always use verlan and say it backwards to get "keum"

Italian: tedesco
Polish: Niemiecki

And yeah, 'coney.' Presumably at one point Coney Island was overrun with rabbits.

i only know 'mec' because james lipton from the actor's studio was briefly a pimp in france.

maybe 'mack' comes from 'maquereau'?

Always wondered where 'tedesco' came from, if maybe the word was related to 'Deutsch.'

Apparently you're right. From a language message board I get the explanation that "theodiscus" was a German dialectal word meaning something like "of the people," first cited in 786 AD and which later evolved into Deutsch (German), tedesco (Italian), and teuton (French).

English: boy
French: garcon
German: junge
Italian: ragazzo
Russian: malchik
Spanish: nino

I'm probably too sleepy to think these through properly.

re: boy, i looked up 'cowboy' and couldn't find one for german, which seems odd.

Old Shatterhand?

Cowboy is Cowboy in German.

Hut is German for hat. Pizza Hut chose not to change its name when they expanded into Germany, so it's known there as Pizza Hat.

'Boy' looks good. thanks, ShariVari. iirc, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian all have a different word for this. Is "child" related to "Kind"? If not, then that also should work.

Thanks to everybody else as well- I was afraid this thread would end up a barren Bergmanesque howl into the void on a dreary winter Sunday aka What You Talkin Bout, Willis? but it has shaped up pretty nicely. Now back to my errands.

oh 'nightmare' seemed close except for the mar part of 'cauchemar'

The OED is undecided as to whether "child" is related to "Kind":

from root *kilþ- , whence also Gothic kilþei womb, inkilþô pregnant woman. Not found elsewhere: in the other West Germanic languages its place is taken by kind.

As the form of Old High German, Old Saxon, Old Frisian kind is not satisfactorily explained from the root ken- (Aryan gen-) ‘beget, bear’, and is, for Low German at least, quite irregular, Prof. Sievers suggests the possibility that kind is a perversion of cild, kilþ-, by assimilation to the derivatives of root ken-, which may have spread from Old High German to Old Saxon and Frisian.

Also pied wagtails are great. (Sorry, I only really came in here to suggest "butterfly", but no need, as it was example #2)

if there are related terms that are cognates, you're not finished yet.

pow!
es: pum
de: zack
fr: bang
it: prigioniero di guerra ????

Not quite sure what you mean, fh, that this thread does not meet academic standards and will be rejected by a journal? Please elucidate.

The butterfly page that was linked is great, especially the "ladybug" digression. One more thing about that is the Portuguese word "borboleta" also means "turnstile," in Portugal at least.

Pow! reminds me to list:
En: Ready, Set, Go!
Es: Preparados, Listos, Ya!
De: Achtung, Fertig, Los!
Fr: A vos marques! Prêts? Partez!

Back to boy:
Swedish: pojke
Norwegian: gutt
Danish :dreng

Oh, the Swedish is like the Finnish, "poika".

(As featured in chapter 1 of "Teach Yourself Finnish", the only chapter I made it through.)

Not quite sure what you mean, fh, that this thread does not meet academic standards and will be rejected by a journal? Please elucidate.

you're starting with an english word and then trying to find non-cognates of it from other languages based on the meaning of the english word. but cognates don't necessarily have the same meaning... they have the same origin.

Fr: A vos marques! Prêts? Partez!

Isn't the first part of this "on your marks", though? Which is an often used English alternative, and surely cognate?

fh, isn't that the point? Trying to find phrases where the expressions that transmit the same meaning are non-cognates in multiple languages? I'm not sure what your problem is with the idea.

I thought fh meant something like your example, emil.y, where another word or phrase exists like "on your marks," but I guess not. Truth be told I didn't remember or know the French expression and had to look it up, I guess it doesn't quite work.

Not starting with the English word, fh, starting with the idea that there is a thing that is a *Shark* which has names in four (or more) languages that are not etymologically related. Don't want to get into any philosophical discussion of Signifying Intentional Zombies or "What is it like to be a bat?" or 'Der Schnee ist weiß' if and only if snow is white.

Oh, the Swedish is like the Finnish, "poika".
This happens a lot in Swedish, I think Finnish is an official language in Sweden. Just looked up "butterfly" in a Swedish dictionary and got "fjäril" which I guess is from Finnish but it turns out they also have "sommarfågel."

Well, take the French garcon. It does have a German cognate, Recke, which means warrior. An English one as well... wretch. So... it's not a non-cognate with German, or English. See what I'm saying?

I should come clean and say my ultimate goal is to not let another interesting linguistics thread disappear.

OK, here is the thing that prompted the creation of this thread, long in gestation, this weekend. I still keep wondering whether I am missing something, if I have formulated the problem correctly or if it really works. Or if it really works, is it anti-climactic, so what?. So, my theory, which is mine is that there is a certain chess piece, which moves diagonally on one specified shade of light or dark throughout the entire game which is called

En: the bishop
Fr: le fou
De: der Läufer
Es: el alfil

The bishop, the fool, the runner, and (from the Persian) the elephant rider(!?).

fh, I kind of thought that's what you meant but I guess is should have specified, and I think it is fair to specify, that is OK if a cognate exists, as long as it is not a common word for the exact same thing.

OK, alfil is just an elephant.

But still.

(It's that "the" "the" thing that happens when Spanish and Arabic mix)

It's a different thing then the rest, it is not a name of an animal, like tipsy mothra mentioned, which makes it that much more amazing that it didn't get more standardized.

Your move, ILX.

Shark is actually pretty disparate... German and Icelandic words for shark are cognates (Haifisch and hákarl), but I can't chase down much else!

you really gonna make me google "non-cognate" on a sunday afternoon?

― scott seward, Sunday, February 24, 2013 2:40 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

little-known original line in the Rascals' "Groovin'".

― Tarfumes The Escape Goat, Sunday, February 24, 2013 3:16 PM (4 hours ago)

Songs this thread is making me think of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgB1Jfpjdw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYk1iVEezAg

^ YES

Holy Haifisch, Fledermausmensch, I never knew this version existed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcnEur8lrXc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QXJ3OXWaOY
(You've got to wait through some Broadway ad)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kpe_KHDEfgw
DO U SEE?

I thought this would work:

English: hedgehog
French: hérisson
Italian: riccio
German: igel

But no. Looking at the Spanish (erizo) made me realise I'd overlooked the connection between hérisson and riccio.

Still interesting, though.

hedgehogs are excellent

the near-misses like hedgehog and squirrel are still awesome.

"computer" in icelandic is "tölva" which apparently comes from the Old Norse word for their compass-like unit, talwôn.

Another miss here, but three distinct strands of naming.

English: buttercup
German: Butterblume

French: bouton d'or
Spanish: botón de oro

Italian: ranuncolo

Probably not worth posting any more of the three-stranders, as there will be shedloads out there.

Speaking of which (and this is via google translate, so I'm aware there may be synonymous cognates that just haven't come up)...

English: shed
French: hangar (not counting as a similar cognate because hangars are pretty different to sheds, right? Or is this cheating?)
German: Schuppen
Spanish: cobertizo
Italian: capannone

Are there any resources in English that let you trace foreign etymology, like etymonline?

Dunno. I hope fh can help us.

What about this kind of thing:
En: the honeysuckle
Es: la madreselva
Fr: le chèvrefeuille
De: das Geißblatt

So here we have the Spanish being the wonderful "mother (of the) jungle" and both the German and the French meaning "goat leaf," with the constituent parts for "goat" and "leaf" being unrelated.

The word for it in Czech is pretty cool:
http://www.omniglot.com/blog/?p=3363

Welsh too, on that same page.

Wiktionary is pretty good for English web sites with foreign etymologies, emily.

Shed has some hidden cognates... Italian capannone = Spanish cabana, and Spanish cobertizo = English cover, for example. Badger is another where they look quite disparate but turn to be all pretty much from the same origin!

(not counting as a similar cognate because hangars are pretty different to sheds, right? Or is this cheating?)

That's a pretty deep question, and it's why I was harping on the fact that cognates have similar origins, not meanings. If you start with an English word like shed, you've got to also consider similar English words such as hut, hide, cover, blind, lean-to, shelter, even stuff like gazebo or house.

But not for this game, surely? Those are far too wide. It's not about "does this word have a cognate in English/French/Spanish/German?" but "does this thing have an expression that is a cognate in English/French/Spanish/German?" The reason why I was unsure about hangar is that you can make a case that a hangar is synonymous with shed (it's just a big one), whereas something like "cover" is not synonymous. Metonymy, meronymy, etc etc, those things change language and give us interesting branches. Just because 'chevalier' is from the same root as 'cheval', it doesn't mean we discount 'horse'.

Wait, the second question isn't even phrased right, I don't think. How about "Does this thing have a pan-language consistent cognate from whence it draws its name?"

i think its funny that almost every language - european language - uses a variation of maiz for the word corn except english. even the dutch and german is from maiz and the word corn comes from germany (word for seed).

not funny ha ha, but i'd never really thought about it.

I think your formulation is pretty close, emil.y.

Just investigated
En: the hummingbird
Sp: El picaflor
Pt: o beija-flor

which in most other languages seems to take more or less the scientific name 'colibri.'

So this is what we kind of expect: two interesting colorful distinct words, but then a variant of one of those and then the whole thing dead-ends in the scientific name. And this is why it is kind of interesting that the winners in this thread were able to hold on for so long and not get absorbed into another word. Is it only wishful thinking on our part or are they something more special and unique than mere statistical outliers?

"Does this thing have a pan-language consistent cognate from whence it draws its name?"

Well, take shed as an example. What are the essential properties of a shed for English speakers? Do those properties correspond exactly with the properties of things you have chosen from other languages as equivalents of shed? You can match some aspects, especially if you've specified a particular context, but often you'll end up with a thing in Spanish or German that has incomplete (but sufficient) shedness, or multiple things that satisfy your criteria for shedness. Some of these things will have cognates, and some will not. What, for example, is difference between the words cobertizo, tinglado, and galpón? They all mean shed in Spanish, but all three have separate etymologies.

Maybe that sounds philosophical, but in translation work or etymological research it's a concrete problem. If we're starting from an English thing, we probably want to consider a lot of synonyms in our search for cognates. And the more languages we are searching across, the more abstract that thing is going to get.

I'd search this way: find a common thing where English uses a Celtic word, German uses a Germanic one, Spanish uses something from Arabic, French something from Latin, and Italian something from Greek or even Turkish.

What are the essential properties of a shed for English speakers? Do those properties correspond exactly with the properties of things you have chosen from other languages as equivalents of shed?

See, I'm very interested in this, and it informs my choices and discussion here, I just don't follow you all the way into widening the synonyms until they're no longer synonyms. My boundaries are blurry, I'll accept, but it's a case of you know a shed when you see one, and you know when a shed is no longer a shed.

Having said that, of course your contributions are very interesting! I just think trying to discount stuff ruins the game, whereas I accept fully that discounting stuff is essential to real linguistic work.

English brogue (from Irish)
Spanish dialecto (from Ancient Greek)
French patois (from Old Frnech paw/foot)
German Mundart (from Old High German)
Italian vernacolo (from Latin domestic/home-born slave)

...this is of course cheating big-time, because dialect and vernacular are present in English, Spanish, French, and Italian, while brogue is a little over-specific. Still!

You've got a good chance of finding non-cognate English and German words with similar meaning due to English wandering quite far, but Spanish/French/Italian is always going to present a big danger... they're almost always related!

That said...
English glasses
Spanish anteojos
French lunettes
German Brille
Italian occhiali

I guess you could sub in Spanish gafas, since ojo and occhi are cognates.

How do you people even do this?

That's why I made Italian optional to give us a fighting chance with the Romance languages. Otherwise occhiali and anteojos would have got you. Although you could have swapped in gafas. (xp!)

Oh, Wiktionary is a big grip, xpost to myself.

Uh, help, not grip.

This is the best thread, very Language Log / Hat.

wood
bois (French)
legno (Italian)
madera (Spanish)
Holz (German)

En: the leg
Fr: la jambe
Sp: la pierna
Ge: das Bein

Good thing Italian optional because
It: la gamba

Possible spoiler or marrer of perfection:
Latin word "perna" root of "la pierna" looks like it might be related to Latin word "pes" source of French word for foot "le pied"
Fact that "das Bein" etymologically related to the English word "bone," or so Ezekiel says.

Speaking of logs:
English log
French rondin
Spanish leño
Italian ceppo
German Baumstamm (or... Log)

you figure something like "kneecap" could have shaken out a lot of different ways.

perna in Latin probably maps out to peroneal in English (Wikipedia says via Greek perone), no reason it should have anything to do with pied (Latin pes), anatomically easily distinguishable.

How do you people even do this?

― Margaret Vegemite Sanger (Leee), Sunday, February 24, 2013 11:11 PM (29 minutes ago)

fh, I am starting to suspect you were coming up with strict rules as a way of stalling until you came up with some of your own;)

I looked for log b/c of mentioning Language Log. Google Translate has Log way more common than Baumstann in German.

Fuck, en
Foutre, fr
Ficken, de
Follar, es
Kneppe, da
Neuken, nl

Kill, en
Tuer, fr
Uccidere, it
Töte, de
Matar, es
Dræbe, da
Doden, nl

That's pretty good, but isn't the German one a noun but the others verbs? What's the German word, umbringen?

The other thing is that these languages are "foreign" but they are so much a part of Western Culture (Insert ironic/moronic square quotes, Gandhi citation if needed) - music/philosophy/President's Day Free Hulu Streaming Criterions,etc- that it ends up that you don't have to try as hard as you might think to be exposed to them.

Still highly recommend this book which is all about what happens when people learn multiple languages http://www.babelnomore.com/.

Sorry, töte should be töten for part of speech parallelism.

Though umbringen is better, since töten is cognate with doden <== fhazel rule.

See, I'm very interested in this, and it informs my choices and discussion here, I just don't follow you all the way into widening the synonyms until they're no longer synonyms. My boundaries are blurry, I'll accept, but it's a case of you know a shed when you see one, and you know when a shed is no longer a shed.

You can see the blurriness coming into play in the last few examples though... a word like wood with related term forest. In English both "forest" and "wooden material" can be collapsed into one word, wood while Spanish has madera and bosque which cannot be used interchangeably. But French has bois, a cognate of bosque, as an acceptable word for both "forest" and "wooden material". And English does have the word bosk meaning small forest. And the word material in English is a cognate of the Spanish word for wood.

As a native English speaker, you know what's a shed and what is not a shed, but once you say the thing the Spanish call a cobiertazo is a shed, that doesn't mean you know what's a cobiertazo and what isn't. They intersect, but they aren't necessarily congruent. That's going to affect what qualifies as a cognate, even in the stricter sense we're using for this game.

fh, I am starting to suspect you were coming up with strict rules as a way of stalling until you came up with some of your own;)

Heh... I had to let go of my stricter definition of non-cognate before I could really get into it :) I still think it would be quite a prize to find a five-language list of total non-cognates with very similar meanings! If there even are any.

Wow, never knew material was related to madera. Don't think that breaks it though. Although I have to admit I too thought there might be some confusion between "wood, that is still in the tree" and "wood, that is ready to be firewood" but couldn't work it out and I am tired and needing to go to sleep.

Toad, en
Kröte, de
Crapaud, fr
Sapo, es
Rospo, it

So you are still not buying *Shark* and *Butterfly*? Because of Icelandic?

Are toad and Kröte not related then?

Funny thing about toad is trying to get Spanish speakers to sort out the mapping between toad and frog and rana and sapo. Finally had to resort to asking "which do Frenchmen eat and which did the Conquistadors lick and experience hallucinations?"

Wiktionary is cagey with the etymology, saying that in English it's unclear. :-P

Nah, I think shark is pretty solid! Icelandic has a cognate with the German word, but you never said anything about Icelandic!

WIth the cagey etymology toad is looking good. Leee, you are the Come From Behind Kid.

LOL thanks James!

And thank you for this:

Behind, en
Hinter, de
Detrás, es
Derrière, fr
Bag, da
Achter, nl

Wait, can we swap in Italian and swap out French and Spanish respectively to make squirrel and bat work as quadruplets?

This thread/fil/faden/hilo/garn delivers.

Another interesting one that illustrates f hazel's point (unless I'm misunderstanding): potato (derived from Spanish batata), where the roots among Dutch, German, and French are not necessarily cognate, but they all translate literally to something like apple/tuber of the earth (aardappel, Kartoffel, pomme de terre).

but it's interesting that two distant languages both call it earth apples (pomme de terre (fr), aardappel (nl)), while the German Kartoffel goes straight to a Romance language (tartuficolo (it)).

i immediately looked up tuna to see if any languages transliterated to "chicken of the sea" and was verrrry disappointed.

the shark thing is solid but in French, even though it's not used as often you can say un squale, which is exactly like the Italian squalo.

This thread is ILX's Puppy Bowl counterprogramming to OSCARS 2013.

Potato is a twice corrupted mangling of "batata" from Taino (indigenous Haitian/Caribbean language) which explains the lack of latin-ness en español.

But that is a small sweet potato, not what we think of when think of potatoes.

The large white potato was known in Quechua/ancient Incan as "papa",.. which is why in South America, they defer to papa rather than patata... they've been eating them for many millenniums longer than the rest of us.

Leider, squirrel ain't gonna work none, cos in DE it's das Eichhornchen. (the -chen suffix implies small/cute)
from die Eichen (the oaks), die Eichel (the acorn)
"Dichhornetwas" doesn't exist, Dickhornschaf is a bighorn sheep. ("thickhorn", literally translated).
Thus, it being "Das Eichhornhen" it's too close to the French & Dutch

:(

mist a "c" ther, din't i?

i think its funny that almost every language - european language - uses a variation of maiz for the word corn except english. even the dutch and german is from maiz and the word corn comes from germany (word for seed).

Sorry Scott, maize is totally a word in British English.

Shark is actually pretty disparate... German and Icelandic words for shark are cognates (Haifisch and hákarl), but I can't chase down much else!

The Scandinavian languages all have Hai or Haj, i think, and the Russian (Akula) also comes from the same root. I like the speculation that Shark comes from a Mayan dialect.

Leider, squirrel ain't gonna work none, cos in DE it's das Eichhornchen. (the -chen suffix implies small/cute)
from die Eichen (the oaks), die Eichel (the acorn) Thus, it being "Das Eichhornhen" it's too close to the French & Dutch

Well, only Dutch. The French écureuil comes from Old Latin sciurus which is borrowed from the Ancient Greek σκίουρος meaning... squirrel. Not related to the Germanic cognates. Middle English actually had the cognate aquerne with the German Eichhorn but squirrel borrowed from French replaced it.

I was going to say that squirrel and ecureuil would have the same root. I think 'éc...' from 'sc...' is a common thing in french - right now can only think of Écosse for Scotland (presumably the root there is whatever's the Latin form of Scozia) but I'm sure there are lots of others.

École's another one (school)

eichureuil

English - Lollipop
French - Sucette
German - Lutscher
Italian - Lecca-Lecca
Spanish - Piruli
Russian - Ledenets na palochke

idk if that works. French and Germans presumably suck them, Italians lick them and Russians think of them more clinically as a sweet on a stick.

And most importantly, there is France Gall song about them.

D'oh! I didn't notice that the Italian scoiattolo is related to both the English and French for squirrel so doesn't work as a substitute.

Also, the chess thing is really a, horse of a different color in that it is not really an etymological question but I find it interesting in its own right.

Pig, maybe:

F: Cochon
G: Schwein
I: Cerdo
S: Maiale

Is that the primary pig-as-animal word in each language? i can see there's a lot of pig-as-food and synonym overlap (pork/porc/porco, swine/suino).

I was going to suggest:
(en) grape
(de) Traube
(fr) raisin
(es) uva

But the English comes from a French word for a bunch of grapes which has a close cousin in Italian, so I don't think I'm going to be allowed this one. Also the Italian is the same as the Spanish, so there are probably no more languages to add the pile.

en: hourglass
de: Sanduhr
fr: sablier
es: reloj de arena
it: clessidra

Early medieval technology struck me as the most likely fertile ground for this game, being the coincidence of new things, difficult travel and the disintegration of Latin.

Pizza Hut should change its name to Pizza Hat and be done with it IMO.

Grape seems to work despite the various near collisions. Hourglass, I dunno, with all those words for sand, even if they end up bring of different origin, has that same potential problem I had with honeysuckle, compound words based on the same underlying concept even if the constituent words are unrelated. Maybe these should be allowed but under a separate category.

Heartbreaking to find non-cognates in the latin languages, then it turns out English is stinking the place up:

de: Ziegel
es: ladrillo
it: mattone (though NB also laterizio)
fr: brique
en: brick (I was sure this'd be indigenous!)

Thanks. That's one I used to have on my list to investigate.

I always knew the German as Backstein and figured Brick was somehow related to it. Although maybe I was secretly scared away by charcoal briquettes.

I: Cerdo
S: Maiale

Is that the right way round? I've never heard of 'cerdo', but I heard the word 'maiale' a lot in Italy.

Yes, wrong way round, my screw up.

I think this works?

de: Rüsselkäfer
es: gorgojo
it: tonchio
fr: charançon
en: weevil!

Oh, the Swedish is like the Finnish, "poika".
This happens a lot in Swedish, I think Finnish is an official language in Sweden. Just looked up "butterfly" in a Swedish dictionary and got "fjäril" which I guess is from Finnish but it turns out they also have "sommarfågel."

It's the other way around, Finnish has many derived from Swedish, because the area now known as Finland was part of Sweden for hundreds of years. (Finnish is an official language in Sweden mostly because a lot of Finns immigrated there during the 20th century, so Finnish has hasn't had much of an influence on Swedish.) "Fjäril" is Swedish, in Finnish "butterfly" is "perhonen", which I assume has Finno-Ugric roots and isn't an Indo-European cognate.

So, my theory, which is mine is that there is a certain chess piece, which moves diagonally on one specified shade of light or dark throughout the entire game which is called

En: the bishop
Fr: le fou
De: der Läufer
Es: el alfil

The bishop, the fool, the runner, and (from the Persian) the elephant rider(!?).

This is pretty interesting, in Finnish it's called "lähetti", which means "messenger". It probably comes from "the runner" (the Swedish word for the chess piece is "the runner" too); I assume "runner" once once upon a time synonymous for "messenger" in Germanic languages, even though it isn't anymore.

As a side note, when I was young and wasn't that well versed in English, I was confused about what chess piece "knight" was supposed to be... In Finnish (as well as German and Swedish) the piece is called "steed" or "horse", in accordance with how it looks like. Took me a while to figure out the horse simply represents the cavalry, which is the explanation for the English word.

knight in most languages is rider.....rittter / chevalier etc

hence knight rider being tautology ;_;

surely cheval/caballero come from latin caballus=horse ? maybe rider came first tho.

sorry chevalier I meant. tho of course cheval = horse in French

i think its funny that almost every language - european language - uses a variation of maiz for the word corn except english. even the dutch and german is from maiz and the word corn comes from germany (word for seed).

When I started studying German, I was amused by the fact that in almost all the other European languages the words for "television" and "piano" were variants of those words, but in German they are "Fernseher" and "Klavier".

Klavier is an interesting case in general: it comes from the original Latin word for keyboard instruments, but when the pianoforte was invented, seems pretty much all the other European languages accepted the new name for the new instrument, except Germans, who stuck to the old word. I wonder if there's some cultural reason for that?

That whole chain has a great collection of meanings - something like 'gentleman' in Spanish, and 'a bit reckless' in English, as well as free beer for bands before gigs.

fernsehen is sort of the same notion as television (looking into the distance)

I'm talking about knight/caballero/ritter there, not klaviers.

or maybe germans think of it as exactly looking AT the windowpane

fernsehen is sort of the same notion as television (looking into the distance)

Yeah, I know... But with a lot of 20th century inventions (microscope, radio, etc) most European languages tended to borrow a foreign word instead of coming up with an indigenous name for it. Though I guess with television the explanation is simply that Germany was the first country to mass-produce televisions, and hence it made sense they came up with a indigenous word for it instead of borrowing an obscure foreign term.

there was a degree of sniffiness in england about 'television' because it combined greek prefix and latin verb, maybe german pedants felt likewise but even more strongly

I like the fact that everywhere from Greece to Russia to France to Germany has a variation on "medusa" for jellyfish and the English were like "nah, it's a fish made out of jelly, we're calling it that".

A similar word is "ananas", which is the same in pretty much all the European languages, except in English, where they apparently were like, "that looks like an apple with pines, that's what we call it!".

I think there's a stronger & longer purist we'll-make-our-own-compounds-thank-you tradition in German - like this guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_Heinrich_Campe
seems to have had more traction than William Barnes in English.

Ah yes, "The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it." - C.P. Scott.

"Fernseher" is a direct retranslation of the classical components of "television", tele being Greek for "at a distance". "das Telefon" used to be "der Fernsprecher", on the same principle.

There are others like that, where they've reinvented a classical compound word by splitting into component parts and translating each into German; some element names are like this, e.g. Wasserstoff for hydrogen and Sauerstoff for oxygen (oxygen is from the Greek for "producing bitterness", from its role in acid formation, or... something, I'm no scientist).

If anyone is now thinking "if only English had done that too", you may like to read this short piece by Poul Anderson.

I am pleasingly confused by the German "Handy", which appears to be an adoption of an English word which doesn't exist, or at least, doesn't mean "mobile phone".

xp thanks woof, looking forward to reading this

television must've been called something like picturebox here at first

In Finnish, the colloquial term for "television" during it's early years was "seeing radio".

Barnes's Outline of English Speech-craft is quite something btw
http://archive.org/details/anoutlineenglis00barngoog

I don't like seeing English words borrowed then used both non-indigenously and wrong - 'un parking' or 'un shampooing' (that's Turkish, but the -ing isn't)

I am pleasingly confused by the German "Handy", which appears to be an adoption of an English word which doesn't exist, or at least, doesn't mean "mobile phone".

There are some others words like this... In German, the word for panties/briefs is "slip", which is borrowed from English, though I don't know why the Germans wanted to use that English word for that product. I once told a German friend that English-speakers don't call those things "slips", and she was surprised by this, she'd assumed they use the same word.

Another amusing example: in the Nordic countries and Germany (possibly in other parts of Europe as well) toilets are often marked with the letters "W.C.", which comes from "water closet", except that term isn't used in English anymore. In Finnish, the most common local word for toilet, "vessa", is derived from how Finns pronounce the letter "W.C.".

the initialism 'wc' is still used in english speaking countries despite the demise of the phrase itself

Ah, I didn't know that! Are toilets commonly marked with those letters?

maybe not commonly, but you will see it around the place from time to time, especially on a diagram of a building or example

/for/ example

In here it's still the most common way to mark a toilet.

I call it the necessary room.

Another example of odd use of English terms: in Finland, collarless sweaters made of thick fabric (except wool) are often called "college shirts" ("college-paita"). For proof:

https://www.google.fi/search?hl=fi&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1361&bih=872&q=gollege-paita

I'm not sure what's the origin for that.

Actually thought about starting a thread about things like the German "Handy" but figured it would be all downhill from there, and mostly stuff from Japanese so thanks for proving me wrong. In any case we should probably just use this thread.

Only sort of related, but it really interests me when a group of words has sort of different boundaries of meaning in different languages.

Like, in Danish and English To Float and At Flyde is the same verb. But when it is sorta adjectivised: 'is Floating' / 'er Flydende', the Danish word kan both mean something that is floating, and something that is liquid, like water. The word Liquid is like the word Likvid, which mainly has meaning in economic terms. And Liquid can be nounified, 'A Liquid', but that would be 'En Væske' in Danish. And Væske can be verbified and adjectified again: 'at Væske' 'et Væskende' but that is used when wounds become disgusting and start dripping liquid.

Anyhow, it fascinates me...

Just now remembered a popular favorite "un smoking" in which the French took the term from English and dropped the word "jacket."

If i could find my copy of this book, i could just take pictures of the pages and post them instead of typing typing typing

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51xz%2B38mm8L._SL500_SS500_.jpg

haha, yeah, I am wanting to get home and go through

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41QQQEJ9VZL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

does anyone else have that book? it's apparently not very tough to get ($0.01 price point) and it's one of my favorites! so many differently shaped words. it's like a picture book for words where you can think about what they mean or not, you can just browse them and think about their various distinctive features.

this is a lovely thread btw, nice work (if, as fh has stated, on a little shaky ground re: semantic shift -- but who cares, not me)

That thing must be like a brick/ladrillo/Backstein, La Lechera, how could you misplace it? I guess it must be very concise indeed.

And thanks. I think we might be winging it a bit, but we can leave it to the big boys to vet them later for their official certification.

Only sort of related, but it really interests me when a group of words has sort of different boundaries of meaning in different languages.

I always put it back somewhere "safe" but it changes every time, so I can never remember where I put it! I'm gonna look in a couple other places.

My other favorite dictionary is Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang (this is the edition i have) http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51yqLQO2E%2BL._AA160_.jpg

and I also have his Gentle Art of Lexicography and Origins, all very enjoyable if you like that sort of thing.

love partridge, keep his Dictionary of the Underworld by the loo.

So this doesn't quite work because of - surprise- English and French
En: the summit
Fr; le sommet
De: der Gipfel
Es: el colmo

Also points off for Latin-derived cognate with the Spanish, "culmination"

wait, el colmo is not right, it's la cumbre.

Also I feel there's no better place to put this thought, but speaking of cognates every time someone on the radio says "sequestration" I not only see it with a c, but I think about hostage holding/kidnapping. Interesting choice of words, political strategists.

"Fjäril" is Swedish, in Finnish "butterfly" is "perhonen

Never thought this thread would hit 200 posts.

How do you people even do this?

― Margaret Vegemite Sanger (Leee), Sunday, February 24, 2013 11:11 PM

This thread is ILX's Puppy Bowl counterprogramming to OSCARS 2013.

― Plasmon, Monday, February 25, 2013 1:21 AM (9 hours ago)

many xps remind me that the swedish word for "corduroy" is "manchester".

Woah, superb! Corduroy United.

My name is Sam Tyler. I went to Stockholm on vacation, put on some corduroys, and now I'm back in 1973.

re: false friends

I had an Italian student (learning English) in a class once who was asked 'what would you do if you found a spider in your bath?' and he just looked as if the questions was completely insane and kept saying 'but this is impossible!'. It took quite a while to work out that 'spider' appears to mean some kind of sports car in Italy.

JamesDeanCarCrash.jpg

I was gonna say, was this 1964 or something? What an antiquated sounding anedote! I remember my parents joking about the Nova in Mexico to similar effect.

I would prefer the ensuing confusion had he said "I would break down the bathroom wall to have it lifted out, then I would ride it past the cafés where the pretty girls sit, and maybe the next day I would sell it for a lot of money"

English: kite (toy)
French: cerf-volant
Spanish: cometa
German: Drachen
Italian: aquilone

Etymonline says the English word comes from the bird kite ((Milvus ictinus), derived from Old English cyta "kind of hawk," probably imitative of its cries (cf. Old English ciegan "to call," German Kauz "screech owl").

the French word comes from the Occitan "sèrp-volanta" (flying serpent). it's apparently unrelated to "cerf", the French word for deer. "cerf-volant" also means "stag beetle" in French and comes from the beetle's ability to fly and the resemblance of its mandibles to deer antlers.

the Spanish word, unsurprisingly, means "comet", and comes from the Greek "kometes" (literally "long-haired").

the German word is a form of "Drache" (dragon).

the Italian word comes from "aquila" ("eagle" in Italian and Latin). but "aquilone" also means "north wind" (from the Latin "aquilonis").

kites were introduced to Europe from China, so I wonder if the French and German terms originally referred to Chinese kites in the shape of dragons or just to the dragon as a symbol of Chinese culture.

the bird "kite" doesn't belong in this thread, but here it is in five languages:

English: kite
French: milan
Spanish: milano
German: Milan
Italian: nibbio

the French, Spanish, German, and Italian words come from the Latin "milvinus" (a form of "milvus", which refers to the bird). "milvinae" in scientific terms is a subfamily of the kite. the word is unrelated to the Italian city

the English word comes from the bird kite ((Milvus ictinus)

correction: "Milvus inctinus" seems to be an outdated term for the common European kite. In general the word "kite" refers to a number of species of birds from the family Accipitridae. I don't know what species the common terms originally referred to.

Nice. Had forgotten about "kite." I knew "cometa" and "Drachen" but never came across the French term. Also, this one is analogous to the chess piece in that it is the name of a thing that expresses how it is like four or five different types of other things.

A similar word is "ananas", which is the same in pretty much all the European languages, except in English, where they apparently were like, "that looks like an apple with pines, that's what we call it!"

Meant to say that there a bunch of these for fruits, but I can't recall any offhand.

"Lamp" seems to be one of the most consistent words in the Indo-European language family, save the Indo-Iranian branch. Across hundreds of languages, it's pretty much lamp all the way down... lamp, lampa, lampi, lampo, lampada, lamba... even Sardinian and Basque!

Cold lampin' with f. hazel

do you have a whole list of these, JRB? I'd be interested in seeing it.

i was looking up cauchemare and apparently the mar part means spirit, but that doesn't make sense since it's a horse. is it a pun, then? so if nightmare in english comes from horse but cauchemare in french comes from spirit, then maybe it could slide in?

The mare in the English nightmare does not come from horse... it's an old English word meaning "evil spirit" in particular one that sits on you while you sleep, preventing you from breathing.

(xp)
No, I only had the three I had when I started the list. I had thought about a few others but hadn't chased them down and then I forgot about them until somebody posted them here. This thread is the list!

Maybe it's a seahorse spirit?

I thought it might have come from the sea.

When I started the listthread

Looks like the French mare in cauchemare has the same meaning and origin... the French borrowed it from the Middle Dutch, which got it from the same Proto-Germanic word as Old English did.

So, fun cognates: nightmare and the Irish phantom queen from folklore called Morrígan, ultimately both derived from the Proto-Indo-European *mor- meaning (rolleyes) "malicious female spirit".

wizards of the coast you've led me astray yet again
http://magiccards.info/scans/en/5e/46.jpg

http://mrparsons.webspace.virginmedia.com/assets/images/KnightmareDL.jpg

tying all the loose threads together

this might be more different languages describing something that isn't exactly the same thing but close enough that no one bothers to create a new word for it:

en: doughnut
fr: beignet
de: krapfen
es: buñuelo
it: ciambella

little iffy on bunelo/beignet

No, I only had the three I had when I started the list. I had thought about a few others but hadn't chased them down and then I forgot about them until somebody posted them here. This thread is the list!

ah, I see. I thought when you said there were a bunch of these for fruits, you meant you had some more in mind before you started this thread.

I really like when you get place names that change between languages - Moscow, Mosca, Moskva, etc - but are these ever non-cognates?

we'd better start researching nouns in ye-ye song titles, because there seem to be a lot of those with non-cognate words in them. there's the two France Gall songs already mentioned, and there's this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RW0UBXdMQw

I really like when you get place names that change between languages - Moscow, Mosca, Moskva, etc - but are these ever non-cognates?

― Ismael Klata, Monday, February 25, 2013 8:19 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes! But I'm not sure this happens enough for the strictures of the thread. Best one (lifted directly from wiki):

in German the country is known as Deutschland, in Scandinavian languages as Tyskland, in French as Allemagne, in Polish as Niemcy, in Finnish as Saksa, and in Lithuanian as Vokietija.

And obviously, Germany in English.

my high school German teacher tried to convince my class that "German" literally meant "man with spear" (from the Germanic words "man" and ger"), but I think that's a false etymology.

The Alemans were a tribe as, obviously, were the Saxons. I believe Deutsch and Tysk are cognates (and related to tedesco).

There's Hungary-Magyarorszag and Suomi-Finland, as collectors of panini stickers will know. Extra point for those being Finland's two languages as well!

The Franks were purportedly named for their axes.

Yeah, some of the words for Germany are cognates, but there are a large number of disparate roots that haven't been homogenised in modern languages. The wiki is pretty good for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Germany

Shqiperia-Albania too, and Hellas-Greece. What about cities, any of those?

Michael! We've been waiting for you.

English: deckchair
French: transat (from "transatlantique")
German: Liegestuhl
Spanish: tumbona
Russian: шезлонг ("chaise-longue")
Italian: sdraio

The problem with this one is that German "Deckstuhl" exists but as far as I can see it's used in the specific sense of a chair used on a ship's deck, but as far as I can see it's rarely used in the general sense of a folding chair used at the beach etc. Hence http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liegestuhl says <<Der Liegestuhl war ursprünglich ein Deckstuhl für Reisende auf Linien- und Kreuzfahrtschiffen>> ("the Liegestuhl was originally a Deckstuhl for travellers on liners and cruise ships").

English: Go!!!
French: Allez!!!
Spanish: Venga!!!
German: Hopp!!!
Italian: Vai!!!

The Venga Bus is coming!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2MftBoioIM&feature=youtube_gdata_player

not to crash the Steve Vai/Vengaboys bus but aren't they from the same root?

As is 'allez', which is 'va' in singular

Okay, I'm pretty sure those better versed in linguistics will point out synonyms here, but from very basic research I have:

English: yob
German: Halbstarke
French: loubard
Spanish: gamberro

As I say, words like this are problematic, because there are just so many interchangeable synonyms, dialect terms, etc. But I figure I might as well post it up seeing as I spent ten minutes looking at it.

Also thought Venga meant come, not go

Fruit list was basically:
Vocabulary list in Portuguese instruction book
Poster in pizzeria on Northern Blvd with Latin American Spanish names for fruits that were possible sno-cone flavor mix-ins

One more thing about city names is the München/Monaco correspondence, to the point where somebody meant to go to one but went to the other one.

And another good one from Italian, Nizza for Nice. How often have I wanted to post "Nizza otm"

Shqiperia-Albania too, and Hellas-Greece. What about cities, any of those?

Donostia/San Sebastian?

Chennai/Madras was the only non-cognate candidate I could think of; but it appears it was named after one predecessor town, then was changed for nationalistic reasons to being named after a different predecessor town, so that doesn't work.

Yes! Donostia is right.

Dublin/Baile Atha Cliath is the same maybe? Except I believe Dublin translates as 'Blackpool', so not sure how it's acquired two quite separate names.

English: prank
French: farce
Spanish: trastada
German: Streich
Italian: burla

^ this might not be 100% accurate b/c I cheated and used google translate & picked the most applicable synonyms. none of the synonyms listed appeared to be cognates.

re: venga -- whoops, they would be different roots then. i looked it up -- it's used something like "come on"?

Don Ostia translates to San Sebastian in Basque.

English: mushroom
French: champignon
German: pilz
Italian: fungo
Spanish: seta
Russian: grib

I *think* these are the most common names for mushrooms but there are so many variations (wild vs cultivated vs specific common varieties) I'm not sure.

xp

ahh I see, did not check that.

would Swansea/Abertawe be another?

I feel like they should be numerous (but I'm ignorant) – like any small language group that has a big power next to it will produce them, bet there are a ton in the old Soviets.

English: prank
French: farce
Spanish: trastada
German: Streich
Italian: burla

Hmm, are 'prank' and 'farce' too close in English to allow this? Not sure. Also, is 'burla' the root of 'burlesque'?

this is kinda opposite this thread, but i blew my own mind a while ago learning that Jakob, James and Diego are all the same name

Oh man, if you track all the versions of 'John' you get some far-out shit.

there's a nena (of 99luftballoons) movie called "gib gas" that's supposed to mean "let 'er rip"
i don't know how to search for these in other languages without getting transliterations.

It's like the last time anyone thought up a new boy's name was 3000BC, until you started getting your Nikes and Adidases and so on (ha! and Adidas is from the Adrian root anyway)

Touched on Jacob, James, Diego, Tiago thing here Does anyone here speak Portuguese?, where there is another handy link.

xp

About one fifth of all males in the UK between 1800 and 1850 were christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n18/james-davidson/flat-nose-stocky-and-beautugly

Still can't find any more exotic fruit names aside from "abacaxi" and for sure it is doubtful for that I will find any that would satisfy the original requirements of this thread. Sorry to imply this linguistic El Dorado that turns out not to exist, unregistered.

James, your first interpretation of my original question is correct.

english: caterpillar
spanish: oruga/gusano
french: chenille
german: Raupe/Raupenfahrzeug
italian: bruco
irish: bolb

Perhaps there are better things i could be doing in my lunch break than looking up central / eastern European names for the tadpole but it's really interesting:

Belarus: Apoloniki
Bulgaria: Popova Lizhichka
Croatia: Punoglavac
Czech Rep: Pulec
Germany: Kaulquappe
Hungary: Ebihal
Latvia: Kurkulis
Lithuania: Buožgalvis
Poland: Kijanka
Romania: Mormoloc
Russia: Golovastik
Ukraine: Gugolovok

english: caterpillar
spanish: oruga/gusano
french: chenille
german: Raupe/Raupenfahrzeug
italian: bruco
irish: bolb

― gyac, Tuesday, February 26, 2013 6:56 AM (2 hours ago)

Lightning has a nice variety of roots, but plenty of cognates too:

English Lightning
German Blitz
French foudre/éclair
Spanish relámpago/rayo
Italian fulmine/lampo

I figured lightning and Blitz would eventually have the same Germanic or PIE root, but apparently not.

And there goes that lamp again.

I can't let go of lamp.

i like lampo

Iampo italiano

RosemaryClooney.jpg

I'm curious about any differences between foudre/éclair. Eclair seems to describe a flash of lightning, whereas foudre refers to lightning more generically and has a connotation of divine wrath. Interestingly, in the masculine, le foudre refers to the bundle of three lightning bolts Jupiter carries in hand.

Obviously not qualifying, but I have to admire that something as noble as a fart (cognate with German farzen) comes from PIE perd-, with the French (péter) and Spanish (peerse) cognate as well. Weirdly, though, Italian (scoreggiare) is the odd one out.

found it!

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8518/8518198015_9450ec875a.jpg

I was thinking of starting another thread with another challenge this weekend and posting some other stuff of interest, but I dunno, now that this topic has, um, stabilized and La Lechera has found her Twenty-Six Languages book, maybe we should repurpose, but not necessarily retitle, this thread as a Rolling Thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWhzG9cQGgc

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_urG3jyCy7Ls/SPF__YtYRWI/AAAAAAAANxE/qjE155DSM5U/s320/Lou-Reed.jpg
I can't seem to make up my mind

i'll take requests -- but i already looked for lamp and it wasn't in there!

Well, that clears up where the English word "haversack" comes from at least.

and this is the song this thread makes me think of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99-7NTP7PM0

This morning wondering about words that clearly derive from another language but with different meanings, like "library" and "libraire." I guess that's going to be affected a lot by historical and cultural factors. Anyway, do these kinds of words have a name?

False cognates? Embarrass/embarazada being the example that springs to mind.

False friends

Which are called by basically the same name across the board:
faux amis
falsos amigos
falsche Freunde

strictly speaking, false friends and false cognates aren't exactly the same... two words that appear to have a shared etymology but do not are false cognates, such as English light and German blitz "lightning" for example. Two words that sound alike but have different meanings are false friends, and they usually are cognates (English molest and Spanish molestar "to bother") but don't have to be (English galena "lead sulfide" and Portuguese galinha "hen").

That reminds me of that embarrassing incident with the lead sulfide on my Portuguese holiday...

Isn't that the name of a Fairport Convention album?

liege and lief are false cognates

I'm glad this thread made me dig out Partridge's Origins. Otherwise, I would have not made a connection (although it's totally obvs now that I think about it) between hymnal and hymen.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8248/8527358827_4213032133_c.jpg

that's just a random page! there 971 others!

Well, that clears up where the English word "haversack" comes from at least.

I'm pretty sure French got it from English

OED lists both the French havresac and German habersack as sources for the English, so it seems like things are not cut and dried.

The French seem to think they got it from German. Haber and haver for oats is common to both English and German, apparently.

Man, I wish English had ended up with oatsack as the word for backpack.

Weird thing across the US is the varying use of the terms "bag" "sack" or "pack." Vestigial trace of the Old Weird America.

http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_109.html

don't forget poke!

Ha, thanks.

I do know that the Spanish equivalent of "to buy a pig in a poke," from the opposite point of view, is "dar gato por liebre" - to give a cat for a hare.

this reminds me of that time i resisted buying all of the DARE volumes

confident use of the past tense there.

once the sale was over i felt safe from dropping $400+ on recreational dictionaries

but it's a vacation... in your mind!

The only vacation that matters.

en: dog
de: hund
fr: chien
es: perro

I assume Italian "cane" is a cognate with French "chien", and of course other cognates lurk (hund/hound).

Fine, I can admit that I regret not shelling out for the DARE.

en: hat
cz: klobouk
dt: hoed
fi: hattu
fr: chapeau
de: Hut
gr: καπέλο
hi: topi
it: capello
pl: kapelusz
ro: pălărie
ru: shlyapa
sp: sombrero
sw: hatt

idk what's up with czech and romanian there but that's a pretty clear romance/germanic split

шапка is probably my favourite example of the problems that come with trying to identify Russian words by visual similarity with English letters.

Another page from that book -- its browseability illustrated here with a page featuring the following four words:

advice after affair afternoon
or
after afternoon affair advice
and so on

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8516/8597304343_6f184b71c5_b.jpg

wow, afternoon looks like a winner!

also, cannot recommend this book enough:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0816652724/

or its cheaper cousin by the same author:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0195387074/

he is fun to read!

wow, afternoon looks like a winner!
Close. But aren't the "mit" in "Mittag" and the "mi" in "midi" related?

Will be checking out Word Origins, thanks.

is mittag used differently from midday?

Don't think so.

Hm. Brief search indicates the French is coming from Latin and the German and English more from something Germanic.

yeah, they all seem to lead back to the same Proto-Indo-European root (*medhyo meaning "middle")... including the Italian, which got by me initially, it's basically "post-meridian."

Plant known in English as monkshood or wolfsbane has all sorts of great names in various languages including

D: Eisenhut , "iron hat"
P: carro-de-venus "carriage of Venus"

Full list here:http://irapl.altervista.org/botany/main.php?taxon=Aconitum+napellus

Wikipedia has some good names too:

Aconitum (pron.: /ˌækəˈnaɪtəm/ A-co-ní-tum),[1] also known as "the queen of poisons", aconite, monkshood, wolf's bane, leopard's bane, women's bane, devil's helmet or blue rocket

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aconitum

One old reference has in it a listing for a Danish term, Blauemunke- "Blue Monk." Who knew?

Wikipedia table of chess piece names:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_piece#Piece_names

Wikipedia links to this interesting article, originally written in Finnish: http://www.shakki.net/kerhot/KemTS/nap-pieces.htm

hmm interesting common groupings for "bishop"

And thank you for this:

Behind, en
Hinter, de
Detrás, es
Derrière, fr
Bag, da
Achter, nl

― Liz Phair Dinkum (Leee), Monday, 25 February 2013 05:29 (1 month ago) Permalink

hinter has a common root with hind.

I was wondering about Poulenc/Pollo -- seems likely but the spelling and pronunciation have kind of obscured it. German "huhn" (presumably the origin of "hen") is nothing like the english "chicken."

German has "Küken" for chick (in the general bird sense) - I would have guessed that's cognate but not sure.

what about pencil?
pencil, en
crayon, fr
lapiz, es
matita, it
bleistift, de

hey, that's a really good one!

Chicken is a relatively recent term, though, isn't it? Weren't they once primarily called 'fowl'?

Pencil is awesome. Note that the a word spelled exactly the same as, but presumably unrelated to, the Italian word for 'pencil', 'matita', appears in Tom Jobim's "The Waters of March" in the context of the "Matita Pereira," which is some kind of mischief-making magical bird (don't know if it has to do with pear trees either). Ctr-F through this Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saci_(Brazilian_folklore)

Click through doesn't quite work due to interpretation of closing paren, but just click through again after "Did you mean:"

More pencils:

Karandash - Russian
Ołówek - Polish
Tuzka - Czech

In Swedish it's "penna", which must be a gognate of "pencil".

btw anyone have awebsite where i can look up the translation of a word in multiple languages at one time. rather than having to google translate one language at a time. looking for something kind of like that awesome multiple language dictionary shown upthread.

I'll be happy to take requests in a week or two when my books are all unpacked. That's all I've got!

have read something about "turkey" that is relevant to thread, people everywhere always assume this bird comes from some other land and name it accordingly, therefore turkeys are from space.

Yes, have read exactly that thing about the turkey and wondered if and when we should discuss on this thread.. We think it is from Turkey but in France- and it Turkey!- they think it is from India.

And the Portuguese think it is from Peru!

apparently the first recorded mentions of turkey is from mexico. the aztecs called it huexolotl : not only that sounds suspiciously like a turkey noise but they are not referencing to another land ... that adds legitimacy to the theory that mexico was their original landing spot . further proofs
http://i.imgur.com/NZbqyZQ.jpg
+
http://i.imgur.com/Gd7Hhn6.jpg
+
http://i.imgur.com/NgTHFLA.jpg

Jibe, I used Wiktionary.

Seems like this word might actually work
E: turkey
F: dinde
D: Truthahn
S: pavo
I: tacchino
P: peru

thx leee, exactly what i was looking for.

E: sample
F: échantillon
I: campione
S: muestra
G/DE: probe

More pencils:

Karandash - Russian
― хуто-хуторянка (ShariVari), Wednesday, April 24, 2013 8:52 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

As a kid back in the 70s/80s you used to see adverts for boxes of pencils called Caran D'Ache or something similar. Is that something that was synecdoched in Russian then mispelt, or possibly the other way around. Looks to be a major coincidence if it isn't directly connected.

I think Caran d'Ache was a pseudonym that the company was later named after and I'd guess it came from the Russian.

Hey check this out http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caran_d'Ache

E: meat
F: viande
S: carne
G: fleisch

E: barley
F: orge
S: cebada
G: gerste

E: pumpkin
F: citrouille
S: calabaza
G: kürbis

btw anyone have awebsite where i can look up the translation of a word in multiple languages at one time. rather than having to google translate one language at a time. looking for something kind of like that awesome multiple language dictionary shown upthread.

― Jibe, Thursday, April 25, 2013 3:26 AM (2 days ago)

It doesn't always get things right, but logosdictionary.org is a pretty good resource.

E: barley
F: orge
S: cebada
G: gerste

the French word orge derives from the Latin hordeum, and the German word Gerste is akin to the Latin word (if Wiktionary and Etymonline are to be trusted). all of these words (and the English word "horror") may derive from the root "ghers-", meaning "to bristle".

yeah

i don't know if there's a name for semantic cognates but butterfly & Schmetterling are that, though not syntactic cognates, which is what we usually mean by cognates

Prefer the alternate etymology in which the ''butter" comes from "butor-" meaning "beat."

Ice Age cognates! Infographic showing 23 cognates from a (reconstructed) 15,000-year-old Eurasian language family:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/words-that-last/?hpid=z4

That time frame is crazy in linguistic terms. Link to the original paper, which is quite readable:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/01/1218726110.full.pdf+html

Having long ago been trained in the orthodox "you can't go back further than PIE" school of thought, I tend to approach this stuff with an amount of prejudice even though it's a lot of fun to read. Skimming over the PNAS article, I think the weak link in the argument is their use of LWED to provide cognates across proto-languages. If we accept that LWED provides mostly plausible cognate links at a time depth of ~10k years, then it's pretty cool and intuitive that the concepts with the most cognate links tend to be the ones with high frequency. If we don't accept LWED then there isn't much to conclude. The authors don't really acknowledge that the cognate links in LWED (or any posited links going further back than PIE) are far from universally accepted.

It seems like they are demonstrating the effectiveness of their statistical model to provide additional support for the plausibility of the LWED proto-word corpus? I need to read it not at work.

hahaha, I went and asked some Linguistics profs about the article at lunch and as soon as they heard Pagel's name they were like "fuck that guy, he's an idiot."

(Don't tell them about our thread. They may call us idiots too!)

we can take em

Nah, they'd read this thread and then beg us all to sign up for a LIN 350 Topics in Linguistics class.

^^^^ uh, yeah

i feel that way all the time on ilx and i only have a MA!

posting again to re-recommend anatoly liberman's "word origins and how we know them". i think it's the most charmingly digressive book i've ever read. it has been delighting me all evening.

Language Log on that PNAS article: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4612

One problem is that Eskimo is not a language family; it's part of the Eskimo-Aleut language family, and any effort to find deeper genetic relationships for Eskimo that doesn't take Aleut data into account is not likely to be useful.

#shade

There's a science radio show that delights in pronouncing PNAS "PEENAS" whenever they mention an article from it.
Is that how it's supposed to be?

That's how I say it. In science you take the lols where you can find them.

I must confess it has been a struggle for me to not go "lol P-NAS" in this thread. I'm glad others have broached the subject.

it does come off the tongue smoothly

What about
E: newspaper
F: journal
S: periodico
G: Zeitung

Obviously lots of cognates- "journal", "periodical", "the Times"

Forgot to put E for Español and D for Deutsch. Hopeless.

Oh wait

E: toad
F: crapaud
I : rospo
S: sapo
D: Kröte
L: bufo

Also the other day was trying to think of the different ways to say "What's his name?" In French I learned "machin" and "quidam." in Spanish "Fulano, Mengano y Zutano"- although there is apparently a "Perengano" also- and especially "Fulano de tal." Couldn't remember if there was an equivalent in German. At the end of of this wikipedia page there is an interesting discussion of this in various languages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable.

Below articles in Portuguese and Spanish have a big table for the various countries around the world. My favorite is Colombia, I think.
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulano_(an%C3%B4nimo)
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin_nombre

While hide the first one inside url tags to see if that helps
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulano_(an%C3%B4nimo)

Nope: one more try
Pt article on Fulano

OK that worked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cleiAmpDSvc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaCPBmkgeQ8

As a bonus, here is a list of some exotic Brazilian fruits. I have no idea what they are: uxi, bacuri, taperebá e cajarana.

Wait toad was already there, sorry

Toad, en
Kröte, de
Crapaud, fr
Sapo, es
Rospo, it

― Liz Phair Dinkum (Leee), Monday, February 25, 2013 12:13 AM

http://www.feorag.com/assets_c/2013/07/Eurobeer-map-919.html

Thanks. Should come in handy for Tuomas's visit.

This popped up on my FB feed; doesn't quite fit the thread parameters, but hey...

http://www.feorag.com/Eurobeer-map.png

Um, seandalai?

http://www.feorag.com/assets_c/2013/07/Eurobeer-map-919.html

― Talking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) Blues (doo dah), Monday, July 8, 2013 4:53 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oops...hoisted by my own recentness illusion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_xUIDRxdmc

Requiem sharks are a family, Carcharhinidae, of sharks in the order Carcharhiniformes, containing migratory, live-bearing sharks of warm seas (sometimes of brackish or fresh water) such as the tiger shark, the blue shark, the bull shark, and the milk shark.

The name may be related to the French word for shark, requin, itself of disputed etymology (chien de mer or Latin requiem ("rest"), which would thereby create a cyclic etymology: requiem-requin-requiem). [2]

Italian: lo squalo

Interestingly there are a few sharks in French that are called squales.

today my professor was making a point about the arbitrariness of sound's relationship to meaning and used "dog" as an example because it doesn't really have any cognates that didn't come from it, and I thought of this thread.

matches!

fr:allumette
it:fiammiferi
es:cerilla
de:Streichhölzer

i was thinking of this thread recently when i tried to see if i could find things with different names in all the scandinavian languages. i came up with:
en: boy
no: gutt
sv: pojke
da: dreng

en: girl
no: jente
sv: flicka
da: pige

but there are tons of cognates that could also be used (eg. pike in norwegian) so i kind of gave up on it

it:fiammiferi

Or cerini a brand of matches (related to sp. cerilla) by their use of wax on the rolled paper shaft. I never asked for anything but Svedese (a brand name for wooden safety matches that has become a common word for a product like Scott towel, Sopalin (fr.), or Band-Aid) not only beacause they were more reliable (though more expensive) but also 'cause I wanted to see if the tobaccaio had any Swedish girls.

Saw this video last night and one of our favorites from this thread had a cameo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf7gvoTt5oQ

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphyn

In England's first printed book, William Caxton's "Game and Playe of the Chesse" the chessmen now known as bishops are described instead as Alphyns, representing judges: "The Alphyns ought to be made and formed in manere of Juges syttynge in a chayer wyth a book open to fore their eyen."

Kind of, sort of, interesting:
http://www.reddit.com/r/etymologymaps

Reread the whole thread for this first time since, well since it was created. Lot's of good stuff in there. Thanks, everybody.

Apologies for those times when I hadn't read the whole thread and posted repeats.

After a few months of studying Mayan languages, Romance language cognates are so comforting to read about. K'iche' and Kaqchikel have very few English cognates. One fact of interest (probably mainly to La Lechera) is that the Mayan word popol meaning "people" is a false friend to the Italian/Spanish popolo meaning the same thing. Although the origin of the K'iche' word patax meaning "duck" is what it appears to be.

oops, I meant false cognate.

Isn't there an apartment complex in Austin called Popolo Village in Austin, f. hazel? Remember driving past it with one of the Poi Dogs and asking him, "hey, isn't 'popolo' a derogatory term in Hawaiian slang?" and said " yup, it's those guys."

hahaha, the Popolo Village apartments are still here, yes. I live a few blocks from them!

Although as Austin apartment complex names go, I prefer the Fashionaire.

Hmm, so how do I interpret the colors for the etymology map of, say, water? Because "eau," "agua," "water/wasser/etc." are correspond to PIE?

There are three PIE roots meaning "water" from which contemporary languages derive their terms for water, and each color corresponds to one of them. The shades of each color refer (I am guessing) to terms that have younger common ancestors that ultimately go back to the PIE root.

That IS of interest to me!! Did not know that. Describe your studies pls!

I'm taking a class about how linguists go about recording undocumented languages, and since our professor wrote a grammar of Mam (a Mayan language) we are using Mayan languages (K'iche' in particular) as our model for the coursework. For example, you start with a list of words, then work out the sound inventory, then figure out the phonemes, then try and get stories or narratives so you can begin to try and work out morphology and syntax. Kind of a practicum or applied linguistics... basic stuff, but structured as part of an actual process of documentation. The Popol Vuh has been mentioned more than once : )

Me too. And, not to derail my own thread with a naive question, but are Hungarian and Finnish actually related in any meaningful way?
(Xp)

Thanks, f. hazel!

They are from the same language family (Uralic) but Hungarian diverged from other languages in this family (Finnish, Estonian, many others) a long time ago... they aren't mutually intelligible at all. Remember that English is from the Germanic language family and it's not mutually intelligible with any other Germanic language. So the relationship is very meaningful linguistically, but in terms of learning or speaking the language... not all that meaningful.

Thanks. Even though English and German are not mutually intelligible as you say, there is still enough vocabulary overlap at least in the basic words, and similarity in grammatical structure that once you do start to study German you never doubt the relationship, whereas with a more distantly related Indo-European language with a pretty much completely different vocabulary, Russian or Hindi, say, you can tell yourself "yeah, I guess I can see how the grammar is sort of set up along the same lines with lots of different bells and whistles," and with something as different as Welsh or Irish you say "I guess I'll take your word for it."

DANG that sounds like fun!! We did that in grad school, but only once and not deeply enough for my liking, plus my genius fell on deaf ears. Tell me what you learned about the Popol Vuh!!

So I reminded myself that those Uralic languages are not Indo-European so they are already distant enough, and I am presuming within that family, Finnish and Hungarian are quite different other than "OMG, this is a really tough language for outsiders to learn!"

http://cnt.likealaugh.org/165CandacewithanA/20130604-030047-165-224.jpg

I am easily amused.

Ha! I don't think I will share this with mein Mann!

You know what makes me angry? People using the American flag as a signifier for generic 'English'. FUCK YOOOOOOOU.

Actually, so angry that I didn't notice they switch between UK and US flags in that macro (arbitrarily?)

Seems like a collaborative project, given the language differencies.

Is this for real? http://ainolicious.tumblr.com/post/65341249757/english-a-dog-swedish-what-english-the

Well yeah, it's a list of the Finnish word for "dog" with various case endings and clitics. (As you may or may not know, in Finno-Ugrian languages case endings are typically used instead of prepositions.) In the third comment she gradually starts adding two and then three and even four case endings and clitics to the word, which is technically correct, as there's no limit to the number of those a word can have, but in practice it's kinda rare to see anyone use more than two, since it starts to sound artificial.

Like, the last word in the list, "koirinennekokaan" literally means "Even with your dog?", where "-i" = a plural form denoting that there is more than one person who has the dog, "-nen" = "with", "-ne" = "your", "ko" = a clitic denoting that the word is used as a question, "kaan" = "even". The word is intelligible to a native speaker, but it's mostly too complex for common use.

If you wanted to get this idea across in Finnish, I think it would more common simply say "Ettekö edes koiranne kanssa?". In this case sentence the "-ko" clitic is turned into a separate question word "ettekö" (which is in the plural form, so we know there is more than one dog owner the question is addressed to), and the clitic denoting "even" and the case ending denoting "with" are also turned into words of their own ("edes", "kanssa"), with only the case ending denoting "your" ("-nne") still attached to the word "dog", as it cannot be separated from it.

(Though in Finnish vernacular it's pretty common to use a separate pronoun denoting ownership instead of the case ending, but that's grammatically incorrect. So you hear people say "teidän koira", where "teidän" = "your" (in plural). The correct way of saying that would be either "teidän koiranne", where you use both the possessive pronoun and the case ending, or just "koiranne", since the pronoun is redundant if the possession is already denoted by the case ending.)

Hm, seems that in place of transliterating Russian names, Italians will often just use the Czech version: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%ABtr_Il%27i%C4%8D_%C4%8Cajkovskij

Pëtr Il'ič Čajkovskij (/ˈpʲɵtr ɪlʲˈjitɕ tɕɪˈkofskʲɪjascolta[?·info]/, in russo: Пётр Ильич Чайковский[?]; spesso traslitterato come Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky o Ciajkovskij) (Kamsko-Votkinsk, 7 maggio 1840[1] – San Pietroburgo, 6 novembre 1893) è stato un compositore russo del romanticismo.

I guess this is the de facto multilingual lexicography thread?

http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/01/23/word_of_the_year_popular_words_this_past_year_from_countries_around_the.html

The Language Council in Norway chose sakte-tv (slow-TV), reflecting the popularity of shows like "National Wood Fire Night," a four-hour discussion of firewood followed by an eight-hour broadcast of a crackling fire. Some of the good competitors were rekkeviddeangst (range anxiety)—the fear that the battery of your electric car will run out before you can get to a charging station—and revelyd (fox sound) because, of course, Ylvis.

Fun! The author of that article, Arika Okrent, has a really neat book on invented languages that everyone should read. Well, who is interesting in conlangs or just interesting things.

Yes, everyone should read that book. That one and Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners, by Michael Erard.[

I guess this is the de facto multilingual lexicography thread?

"Arika Okrent holds a Ph.D. in linguistics and a first-level certification in Klingon."
i thought okrent invented klingon

Close!

Marc Okrand (/ˈmɑrk ˈoʊkrænd/; born July 3rd, 1948) is an American linguist and is most notable as the creator of the Klingon language.

http://ukdataexplorer.com/european-translator/

http://chapmangamo.tumblr.com/

Awesome. Thanks.

Polish firetruck sirens wail in binary!

I guess this is as a good a place to ask this as any... Last weekend we were discussing the Finnish word "hanki", which basically measn "a layer of snow on the ground that hasn't been plowed or otherwise touched", i.e. the thing that covers the earth after a snowfall. And we were kinda wondering, is there a word for this in other languages? If my description wasn't quite clear, here are GIS results for the word "hanki", so you can see what I mean:

https://www.google.fi/search?hl=fi&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1165&bih=822&q=hanki&oq=hanki

hanki panki

The English phrase is "virgin snow", I think?

"Fresh powder", in a skiing context at least. I'd say "fresh snow", otherwise.

hanki panki

Nice, but the word is pronounced more like "hunky".

hunky punky then

Which is how Americans pronounce it anyway.

Just found a sticker having a red circle containing white left-pointing arrow within and these words:

Drive on the left!
Links Fahren
Conduzca por la izquierda
Conduisez a gauche
Guidate sulla sinistra

Is "left" related to "links," other than starting with the same letter?

Habitaciones
Rooms
Chambres
Zimmer

:)

Back to the butterflies: I have been trying to find out if papilla -> pimple (as in 'lingual papillae') has any shared etymology with papilio -> papillon -> butterfly. I'm thinking they're just similar words, but my google research just tends to throw up pages about words for butterfly in different languages.

papilla is from Latin for nipple, while papilio is Latin for butterfly... probably just similar words.

I think my problem is that etymology sites just go "oh, this is from the Latin" as if there were no other languages before Latin. I realise that it's tough/impossible to follow stuff before Latin, particularly if it goes to a pre-writing stage (then it really is impossible), but... there are fucking years of linguistic development before Latin, have you ever thought that maybe these similar words have a deeper root? But then even writing that out sounds like I have an irrational chip on my shoulder.

etymonline speculates a reduplicated PIE root *pal- 'to touch/feel/shake' for papilio, PIE *pap- 'to swell' for papilla

i don't know if there are any PIE-specific resources on the internet, it's a pretty hard topic to google

ok so in the answers here:

http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1282/why-do-languages-not-share-a-root-for-butterfly

there's a citation:

Etymology
Pā -piliō can reflect reduplication of a root *pl- 'to fly, flutter', which has also served to build the word for 'quail' in BSl. and 'butterfly' in Gm. It seems unlikely that this root *pl- is a very early variant of PIE roots such as *pleu- 'to swim, wander', *pleh3- 'to swim, float', *pelh1- 'to swing'.

from:

Michiel de Vaan. "pāpiliō" in: Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages. Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries Online. Edited by Alexander Lubotsky. Brill, 2012.

otoh this is unavailable w/o a subscription and doesn't seem to have an entry for papilla

---

it looks like your most user-friendly next step would be to go find a copy of the american heritage dictionary of indo-european roots and check out those two, but i suspect this is something you will never be able to answer to your own satisfaction ~

That's pretty good work, man. Thank you.

I think my problem is that etymology sites just go "oh, this is from the Latin" as if there were no other languages before Latin.

The technique by which you get the Latin origin of an English word comes mostly from philology with (hopefully) some application of modern historical linguistics. Once you start talking about Proto-Italic and PIE, you are dealing with entirely reconstructed languages, which is a different set of assumptions and a different kind of evidence. You're still in the domain of etymology, sort of, but when you make the step back from attested languages to reconstructed ones, you're taking a tool used to show the relationships between languages and trying to make it show relationships between words.

Good points, well made (not sarcastic - this is stuff I'm interested in and you've explained well).

http://i.imgur.com/7AeYcfK.jpg

https://s3.amazonaws.com/rapgenius/Homer-Simpson-Doh.jpg

This is what the discussion sounded like while they were making that chart, forks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YClAMYTEuZ0

language log on those butterflies:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=23775&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Have we ever done Foreign Language False Friends? Like
Turkish: tuz - salt
Hungarian: tűz - fire
Russian: туз (tuz) - ace

^There is a lot of this in Julian Rios's Larva

badger (aka brock)
blaireau
dachs
téjon
tasso

already mentioned upthread as in fact NON-non-cognate but worth setting out in full to see the variance anyway (eg dachs and tasso are p close once you think abt it)

quite pleased for some reason also to discover that there are badgers in italy

woodlouse
cloporte
assel
cochinilla
onisco

adding in the dutch for wild invention (and/or correct olfactory observation)
pissebed

... called a slater in Scotland.

En: the bishop
Fr: le fou
De: der Läufer
Es: el alfil

The bishop, the fool, the runner, and (from the Persian) the elephant rider(!?)

(and cf subsquent comments eg from tuomas)

weird thing i have never seen explained (tho it probably has been by now): in lewis carroll's through the looking glass it has been noted that, of the chess pieces featured, there are no rooks -- and commentators (for example martin gardner in the annotated alice) have suggested perhaps there was a mild religious timidity here, given that he was an anglican deacon etc, and presumably had professional dealings with bishops now and then

but of course he DOES feature a pair of messengers, haigha and hatta, "one to come and one to go" -- so as far as germans or swedes or finns are concerned, the piece distinctly does play a part

i wondered if there was a time when the pieces in english were called runners or messengers? or whether LC preferred to fashion jokes based on e.g. the german name (fairly sure he spoke german, tho i forget why i think this)

of course rooks also don't play a part in the book, so…

yes, my rutherglen gran called them slaters

ugh my alice post makes more sense once you substitute bishops for the first mention of rooks (but keep rooks for the final paragraph)

it is too hot here in hackney

Mark, are you familiar with the Barrington Bayley story "The Exploration of Space"?

might have read it as a teenager -- when i devoured a ton of stuff like that, mostly in gollancz collections from the library -- but the synopsis i just looked up didn't ring a bell

(eg i dimly recall a story in which jabberwocky was a code to enter the 4th dimension?)

i also just checked a 1990 edn of gardner's annoted alice and he was still saying the same thing about bishops: "Although Carroll never mentions bishops (perhaps out of deference to the clergy), they can be seen clearly in Tenniel's drawing. Isaac Asimov's mystery story "The Curious Omission," in his Tales of the Black Widowers, derives from Carroll's curious omission of chess bishops."

(Gardner also hovers round the idea that Tweedledum and Tweedledee are possibly rooks.)

(the jabberwocky story is lewis padgett's "mimsy were the borogoves")

I was listening to Ecstasy of St. Theresa and reading up on the etymology of "sussurate" (although I was actually listening to Fluidtrance Centauri) and I figured "whisper" might be fun to look into since most languages might have a bespoke imitative/onomatopoeic form...

English: whisper
German: Flüstern
French: chuchotement
Spanish: susurro
Italian: bisbiglio

Pretty much every Romance language plus English has cognates for the Latin "sussurate" and "murmur" plus German has an alternate noun "Whispern". English ended up using a word derived from "whistle" as the go-to for whisper, just to be different. The French chuchotement has an older form that shows up in the English "chuchotage" which means "the interpretation or translation of speech in a whisper to a single person in proximity to other people" which is cool and I hadn't heard before. Spanish also has "cuchicheo" which at first glance should be related to the French but both languages claim it themselves. The similar spelling might be what is fooling me, plus it's always risky to claim borrowing with onomatopoeic words. The German is unrelated to English's "flustered" which is Scandinavian in origin ("to make slightly drunk"!). And the Italian word is just awesome.

This is a fucking magnificent thread, by the way. This shit is what ILX excels at.

English: pillow
German: Kissen
French: oreiller
Spanish: almohada
Italian: cuscino
Portuguese: travesseiro
Welsh: gobennydd

Wow, not only Italian but Portuguese as well! Nice. Interesting that English pillow comes from Latin via Germanic and through Old English. I would never have guessed that pillow and polvo (Spanish for dust) are cognates!