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

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?

There are three PIE roots meaning "water" from which contemporary languages derive their terms for water, and each color corresponds to one of them. The shades of each color refer (I am guessing) to terms that have younger common ancestors that ultimately go back to the PIE root.

That IS of interest to me!! Did not know that. Describe your studies pls!

I'm taking a class about how linguists go about recording undocumented languages, and since our professor wrote a grammar of Mam (a Mayan language) we are using Mayan languages (K'iche' in particular) as our model for the coursework. For example, you start with a list of words, then work out the sound inventory, then figure out the phonemes, then try and get stories or narratives so you can begin to try and work out morphology and syntax. Kind of a practicum or applied linguistics... basic stuff, but structured as part of an actual process of documentation. The Popol Vuh has been mentioned more than once : )

Me too. And, not to derail my own thread with a naive question, but are Hungarian and Finnish actually related in any meaningful way?
(Xp)

Thanks, f. hazel!

They are from the same language family (Uralic) but Hungarian diverged from other languages in this family (Finnish, Estonian, many others) a long time ago... they aren't mutually intelligible at all. Remember that English is from the Germanic language family and it's not mutually intelligible with any other Germanic language. So the relationship is very meaningful linguistically, but in terms of learning or speaking the language... not all that meaningful.

Thanks. Even though English and German are not mutually intelligible as you say, there is still enough vocabulary overlap at least in the basic words, and similarity in grammatical structure that once you do start to study German you never doubt the relationship, whereas with a more distantly related Indo-European language with a pretty much completely different vocabulary, Russian or Hindi, say, you can tell yourself "yeah, I guess I can see how the grammar is sort of set up along the same lines with lots of different bells and whistles," and with something as different as Welsh or Irish you say "I guess I'll take your word for it."

DANG that sounds like fun!! We did that in grad school, but only once and not deeply enough for my liking, plus my genius fell on deaf ears. Tell me what you learned about the Popol Vuh!!

So I reminded myself that those Uralic languages are not Indo-European so they are already distant enough, and I am presuming within that family, Finnish and Hungarian are quite different other than "OMG, this is a really tough language for outsiders to learn!"

http://cnt.likealaugh.org/165CandacewithanA/20130604-030047-165-224.jpg

I am easily amused.

Ha! I don't think I will share this with mein Mann!

You know what makes me angry? People using the American flag as a signifier for generic 'English'. FUCK YOOOOOOOU.

Actually, so angry that I didn't notice they switch between UK and US flags in that macro (arbitrarily?)

Seems like a collaborative project, given the language differencies.

Is this for real? http://ainolicious.tumblr.com/post/65341249757/english-a-dog-swedish-what-english-the

Well yeah, it's a list of the Finnish word for "dog" with various case endings and clitics. (As you may or may not know, in Finno-Ugrian languages case endings are typically used instead of prepositions.) In the third comment she gradually starts adding two and then three and even four case endings and clitics to the word, which is technically correct, as there's no limit to the number of those a word can have, but in practice it's kinda rare to see anyone use more than two, since it starts to sound artificial.

Like, the last word in the list, "koirinennekokaan" literally means "Even with your dog?", where "-i" = a plural form denoting that there is more than one person who has the dog, "-nen" = "with", "-ne" = "your", "ko" = a clitic denoting that the word is used as a question, "kaan" = "even". The word is intelligible to a native speaker, but it's mostly too complex for common use.

If you wanted to get this idea across in Finnish, I think it would more common simply say "Ettekö edes koiranne kanssa?". In this case sentence the "-ko" clitic is turned into a separate question word "ettekö" (which is in the plural form, so we know there is more than one dog owner the question is addressed to), and the clitic denoting "even" and the case ending denoting "with" are also turned into words of their own ("edes", "kanssa"), with only the case ending denoting "your" ("-nne") still attached to the word "dog", as it cannot be separated from it.

(Though in Finnish vernacular it's pretty common to use a separate pronoun denoting ownership instead of the case ending, but that's grammatically incorrect. So you hear people say "teidän koira", where "teidän" = "your" (in plural). The correct way of saying that would be either "teidän koiranne", where you use both the possessive pronoun and the case ending, or just "koiranne", since the pronoun is redundant if the possession is already denoted by the case ending.)

Hm, seems that in place of transliterating Russian names, Italians will often just use the Czech version: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%ABtr_Il%27i%C4%8D_%C4%8Cajkovskij

Pëtr Il'ič Čajkovskij (/ˈpʲɵtr ɪlʲˈjitɕ tɕɪˈkofskʲɪjascolta[?·info]/, in russo: Пётр Ильич Чайковский[?]; spesso traslitterato come Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky o Ciajkovskij) (Kamsko-Votkinsk, 7 maggio 1840[1] – San Pietroburgo, 6 novembre 1893) è stato un compositore russo del romanticismo.

I guess this is the de facto multilingual lexicography thread?

http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/01/23/word_of_the_year_popular_words_this_past_year_from_countries_around_the.html

The Language Council in Norway chose sakte-tv (slow-TV), reflecting the popularity of shows like "National Wood Fire Night," a four-hour discussion of firewood followed by an eight-hour broadcast of a crackling fire. Some of the good competitors were rekkeviddeangst (range anxiety)—the fear that the battery of your electric car will run out before you can get to a charging station—and revelyd (fox sound) because, of course, Ylvis.

Fun! The author of that article, Arika Okrent, has a really neat book on invented languages that everyone should read. Well, who is interesting in conlangs or just interesting things.

Yes, everyone should read that book. That one and Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners, by Michael Erard.[

I guess this is the de facto multilingual lexicography thread?

"Arika Okrent holds a Ph.D. in linguistics and a first-level certification in Klingon."
i thought okrent invented klingon

Close!

Marc Okrand (/ˈmɑrk ˈoʊkrænd/; born July 3rd, 1948) is an American linguist and is most notable as the creator of the Klingon language.

http://ukdataexplorer.com/european-translator/

http://chapmangamo.tumblr.com/

Awesome. Thanks.

Polish firetruck sirens wail in binary!

I guess this is as a good a place to ask this as any... Last weekend we were discussing the Finnish word "hanki", which basically measn "a layer of snow on the ground that hasn't been plowed or otherwise touched", i.e. the thing that covers the earth after a snowfall. And we were kinda wondering, is there a word for this in other languages? If my description wasn't quite clear, here are GIS results for the word "hanki", so you can see what I mean:

https://www.google.fi/search?hl=fi&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1165&bih=822&q=hanki&oq=hanki

hanki panki

The English phrase is "virgin snow", I think?

"Fresh powder", in a skiing context at least. I'd say "fresh snow", otherwise.

hanki panki

Nice, but the word is pronounced more like "hunky".

hunky punky then

Which is how Americans pronounce it anyway.

Just found a sticker having a red circle containing white left-pointing arrow within and these words:

Drive on the left!
Links Fahren
Conduzca por la izquierda
Conduisez a gauche
Guidate sulla sinistra

Is "left" related to "links," other than starting with the same letter?

Habitaciones
Rooms
Chambres
Zimmer

:)

Back to the butterflies: I have been trying to find out if papilla -> pimple (as in 'lingual papillae') has any shared etymology with papilio -> papillon -> butterfly. I'm thinking they're just similar words, but my google research just tends to throw up pages about words for butterfly in different languages.

papilla is from Latin for nipple, while papilio is Latin for butterfly... probably just similar words.

I think my problem is that etymology sites just go "oh, this is from the Latin" as if there were no other languages before Latin. I realise that it's tough/impossible to follow stuff before Latin, particularly if it goes to a pre-writing stage (then it really is impossible), but... there are fucking years of linguistic development before Latin, have you ever thought that maybe these similar words have a deeper root? But then even writing that out sounds like I have an irrational chip on my shoulder.