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

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