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

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."