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

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"