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

Yes, thanks, guys, great work. But as far as "rabbit," which I had thought of before but forgotten, aren't "conejo" and "Kaninchen" related? Also, skot, did you do that yourself or did it come from Maria? (ha, xp)

I wanted this to be the third one, but I don't think it works
English: the bat
French: le chauve-souri
Spanish: el murciélago
German: die Fledermaus
Italian: il pipistrello

The middle three mean, "the bald mouse," "the blind mouse," and "the flying mouse," which might work except the "mur" in "murciélago" seems to be related to the "Maus" in Fledermaus.

English: the butterfly
French: le papillon
Spanish: la mariposa
German: der Schmetterling
Italian: la farfalla

interesting etymology of 'butterfly' in different languages. bowtie pasta is "farfalle" in Italian.

kaninchen seems to be from the latin too

some of this is probably because there were different vulgar/classical names like equus and caballus

ego sum mercator

grumio est in villa

"Squirrel" doesn't quite work because it is related to "écureuil"

Dang, I knew i would mess up a gender and some spelling it is "la chauve-souris

us i o um o i orum is os is

a ae ae am a ae arum is as is

Bat was the first I thought of, but yeah, it seems that it's not quite there.

maria suggested it! but i looked them up!

English: Wagtail
French: Bergeronnette
German: Bachstelze
Spanish: Aguzanieves
Italian: Ballerina

I think that works.

interesting etymology of 'butterfly' in different languages. bowtie pasta is "farfalle" in Italian.
otm. Always liked this word for 'butterfly'

sommerfugl Norwegian
“summerfly” (or is it “summerbird,” as a German “Vogel”” = “bird“?)

No that was a different kind of pasta.

Don't think I ever heard of a wagtail, but that looks like a keeper. I see some other words listed in the Italian dictionary but even so none look anything like anything else.

I think I've got another that I've finally found this weekend, but I've gotta go do something right this second. Sorry for the suspense.

english: offal
french: abats
german: innereien
spanish: menudencias
italian: frattaglie
romanian măruntaie
greek: entósthia
swedish: slaktbiprodukter

english word offal probably comes from the dutch word afval.

i did that one all by myself!

you really gonna make me google "non-cognate" on a sunday afternoon?

― scott seward, Sunday, February 24, 2013 2:40 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

little-known original line in the Rascals' "Groovin'".

offal in hebrew: psolet

he second fact might have helped Wolf Blitzer lessen his defeat against Andy Richter on "Jeopardy!"

walked, at shoulder, down the street, you weenie

you couldn't tell penne from fetuccini

do you think there's a cutoff date when no newer words can have this property?

I think it's interesting that animal names in particular seem resistant to Latinization. (Is this true of flora, too?) Maybe because they were important words to rural/agricultural life, where people remained illiterate for centuries after the spread of Romance languages?

English: grouse
French: lagopède
Spanish: urogallo
German: Meckern

& Italian: tetraonidi

But as far as "rabbit," which I had thought of before but forgotten, aren't "conejo" and "Kaninchen" related?

Yep. English has a cognate for this as well, which is "coney". So bear in mind that if you're looking to find something with no cognates in those five languages, you have to be aware of related terms. A bit of semantic drift in cognates is to be expected.

does 'pimp' work?
I don't trust google translate -- i thought pimp was 'mec' but it says 'souteneur'

Thought "mec" was just slang for "guy," originally from Arabic, I think. Think the the word you want is "maquereau," which also means "mackerel."

If I could cheat by swapping French for Finnish and Polish, the word for "German" works here:

English: German
Spanish: alemán
German: Deutsch
Italian: tedesco
Polish: Niemiecki
Finnish: Saksa

If "mec" isn't slangy enough you can always use verlan and say it backwards to get "keum"

Italian: tedesco
Polish: Niemiecki

And yeah, 'coney.' Presumably at one point Coney Island was overrun with rabbits.

i only know 'mec' because james lipton from the actor's studio was briefly a pimp in france.

maybe 'mack' comes from 'maquereau'?

Always wondered where 'tedesco' came from, if maybe the word was related to 'Deutsch.'

Apparently you're right. From a language message board I get the explanation that "theodiscus" was a German dialectal word meaning something like "of the people," first cited in 786 AD and which later evolved into Deutsch (German), tedesco (Italian), and teuton (French).

English: boy
French: garcon
German: junge
Italian: ragazzo
Russian: malchik
Spanish: nino

I'm probably too sleepy to think these through properly.

re: boy, i looked up 'cowboy' and couldn't find one for german, which seems odd.

Old Shatterhand?

Cowboy is Cowboy in German.

Hut is German for hat. Pizza Hut chose not to change its name when they expanded into Germany, so it's known there as Pizza Hat.

'Boy' looks good. thanks, ShariVari. iirc, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian all have a different word for this. Is "child" related to "Kind"? If not, then that also should work.

Thanks to everybody else as well- I was afraid this thread would end up a barren Bergmanesque howl into the void on a dreary winter Sunday aka What You Talkin Bout, Willis? but it has shaped up pretty nicely. Now back to my errands.

oh 'nightmare' seemed close except for the mar part of 'cauchemar'

The OED is undecided as to whether "child" is related to "Kind":

from root *kilþ- , whence also Gothic kilþei womb, inkilþô pregnant woman. Not found elsewhere: in the other West Germanic languages its place is taken by kind.

As the form of Old High German, Old Saxon, Old Frisian kind is not satisfactorily explained from the root ken- (Aryan gen-) ‘beget, bear’, and is, for Low German at least, quite irregular, Prof. Sievers suggests the possibility that kind is a perversion of cild, kilþ-, by assimilation to the derivatives of root ken-, which may have spread from Old High German to Old Saxon and Frisian.

Also pied wagtails are great. (Sorry, I only really came in here to suggest "butterfly", but no need, as it was example #2)

if there are related terms that are cognates, you're not finished yet.

pow!
es: pum
de: zack
fr: bang
it: prigioniero di guerra ????

Not quite sure what you mean, fh, that this thread does not meet academic standards and will be rejected by a journal? Please elucidate.

The butterfly page that was linked is great, especially the "ladybug" digression. One more thing about that is the Portuguese word "borboleta" also means "turnstile," in Portugal at least.

Pow! reminds me to list:
En: Ready, Set, Go!
Es: Preparados, Listos, Ya!
De: Achtung, Fertig, Los!
Fr: A vos marques! Prêts? Partez!

Back to boy:
Swedish: pojke
Norwegian: gutt
Danish :dreng

Oh, the Swedish is like the Finnish, "poika".

(As featured in chapter 1 of "Teach Yourself Finnish", the only chapter I made it through.)

Not quite sure what you mean, fh, that this thread does not meet academic standards and will be rejected by a journal? Please elucidate.

you're starting with an english word and then trying to find non-cognates of it from other languages based on the meaning of the english word. but cognates don't necessarily have the same meaning... they have the same origin.

Fr: A vos marques! Prêts? Partez!

Isn't the first part of this "on your marks", though? Which is an often used English alternative, and surely cognate?

fh, isn't that the point? Trying to find phrases where the expressions that transmit the same meaning are non-cognates in multiple languages? I'm not sure what your problem is with the idea.

A fun etymology-related game I have been playing lately is to find one of the legion of lists of "untranslatable" words a la this one (which has lovely illustrations):

https://ellafrancessanders.com/untranslatable-words-from-other-cultures/

and the try and find English translations for as many of them as I can, ideally single-word, by looking at rarely used or archaic terms... or simply starting from the assumption that nothing is truly untranslatable between human languages and being poetically obstinate.

for example, the aforementioned list has the Swedish mångata, "the glimmering, road-like reflection that the moon creates on water" which in English is... moonglade! Which the OED first attests back in 1867.

I find a bit of googling the untranslatable words to be helpful to establish they really mean what the lists say they do, some are just flat-out wrong.

and then, not and the...

Oh, that is a cool endeavour. Please post more if you're up for it.

We have a Finnish word for the same concept as mångata too, it's "kuunsilta", literally "moon's bridge".

i love it!! moonglade!

also reminds me of the grant hart song
you're the moonglade, but you're not the moon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTH4Zu8gleA

Japanese: Komorebi
This is the word the Japanese have for when sunlight filters through the trees - the interplay between the light and the leaves

- surely this is 'dappling'

ooh, excellent idea LL!

along those lines, there is komorebi (木漏れ日) "sunlight that filters through the leaves of trees".

for this I would go with sun-dappled, which is an adjective and not a noun but brings us the same visceral image:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQbm2L9hKSs

(haha, xpost!)

what about pencil?
pencil, en
crayon, fr
lapiz, es
matita, it
bleistift, de

― Jibe, Wednesday, April 24, 2013 6:53 PM (four years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Could the Indonesian 'jayus' be… an 'anti-joke'?

On second thought, 'anti-joke' adds intent to the equation, so it's not quite the same thing.

En:
Fr: taille-crayon
Es: sacapuntas
It: affilacoltelli
De:Spitzer

Hit enter too bloody soon, English is sharpener, unsurprisingly following on from pencils above

Actually I think pencil sharpener is temperamatita in Italian too

The etymology of Italian's matita for pencil is interesting, apparently it's from ematite, or hematite, which they used for writing? Apparently there is a ton of hematite on Elba, compared to the giant graphite deposit found in England in the 16th century... which leads us to (mistakenly) call the stuff in pencils lead!

I always get confusion with that and a certain Tom Jobim lyric.

hahaha, my first impression of temperamatita was "what? paint killer?"

en: toad - From Middle English tode, toode, tade, tadde, from Old English *tāde, a shortening of tādie, tādiġe (“toad”), of unknown origin, possibly from Proto-Germanic. Cognate with Scots tade, taid, taed, ted (“toad”). Compare also Danish tudse (“toad”), possibly from the same root; also Swedish tåssa, tossa (“toad”), Old English tāxe (“toad”), Old English tosca (“toad”) by contrast.

fr: crapaud - Probably from Frankish *krappō, *krappa (“hook”) (because of a toad’s hooked feet) +‎ -aud. Compare Catalan gripau, Occitan, grapaut.

es: sapo - Unknown, possibly from Iberian, cognate with Basque apo.

it: rospo - Uncertain, possibly of Germanic origin

de: kröte - From Middle High German krotte, kröte, krëte, from Old High German chrota, krota, kreta (“toad”), from Proto-Germanic *krudō, *kredō (“toad”), from Proto-Indo-European *guredʰ- (“toad”). Cognate with Middle Low German krōde (“toad”), dated Dutch krodde (“toad”).

what's the word for toad-sharpener in Italian?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOCxplCFYCE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erIxsjOAKc4

This is very close but slightly unsatisfactory

en: raccoon
sp: mapache
fr: raton laveur
de: Waschbär

because the German and the French both have the idea of washing, and Spanish has the term "oso lavador," not sure which term is more common in Peninsular vs. American Spanish. But we also have

it: procione
pt: guaxinim

My wife who's from Costa Rica says she's never heard the name "oso lavador", mapache is the only word for raccoon she knows.

In Finnish we call it "pesukarhu", which also means "wash bear". Probably comes from German via Swedish, as raccoons don't live here, so we wouldn't have an "indigenous" word for them.

en: spats
es: polainas
fr: guêtres
de: Gamaschen

is ruined slightly by French origin of "gaiters" and by the fact that spats are short and gaiters are long, whereas afaik the same word is used for both in other languages, or really only for the long form.

(En) bird
(Es) pájaro
(Fr) oiseau
(De) Vogel
(It) uccello

Oiseau and uccello both come from the same Latin word, aucellus.

Was wondering. But the first four seem to work, I think.

Vogel / fowl

Okay, thanks but “fowl” and “bird” are not related.

Think maybe I found another, if my Zing search worked properly

Not a 'thing' per se depending on your definition but…

E: now
F: maintenant
S: ahora
G: jetzt

Bonus Romanian: acum

Inspired by Learned League.

E: ugly
F: laid
I: brutto
S: feo
G: hässlich

E: duck
F: canard
S: pato
G: ente
I: anatra

Maybe ente and anatra are related?

Apparently so, if you go as far back as proto-Indo-European, which seems kind of tenuous anyway.

This is the one I was thinking of
E: room
F: pièce
S: habitación
G: Zimmer

Which is somewhat unsatisfactory because of the chambers and salons I am avoiding.

Yeah I think there are metaphysical problems there of what is a room

English: pillow
German: Kissen
French: oreiller
Spanish: almohada
Italian: cuscino
Portuguese: travesseiro
Welsh: gobennydd

― Alba, Friday, July 14, 2017 5:51 AM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

this one occurred to me today.

although "guanciale" might have been a better, if slightly awkward, choice for the italian — since both "Kissen" and "cuscino" seem to come via old french "coussin"

This thread inspired me (in part) to name a set of songs i recorded after HEDGEHOGS in 7 different languages. Thank you to emil.y for the hedgehog inspo and all thread contributors for non-cognate inspo <3

https://on.soundcloud.com/xW2Xp

English/French/Spanish/Language Makes No Sense

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shorts

Listening to the hedgehog songs now - they're great, LL!

Thanks for listening!! 💕 I’m proud of these, hence the proper names.