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

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.