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

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?