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

Holy Haifisch, Fledermausmensch, I never knew this version existed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcnEur8lrXc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QXJ3OXWaOY
(You've got to wait through some Broadway ad)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kpe_KHDEfgw
DO U SEE?

I thought this would work:

English: hedgehog
French: hérisson
Italian: riccio
German: igel

But no. Looking at the Spanish (erizo) made me realise I'd overlooked the connection between hérisson and riccio.

Still interesting, though.

hedgehogs are excellent

the near-misses like hedgehog and squirrel are still awesome.

"computer" in icelandic is "tölva" which apparently comes from the Old Norse word for their compass-like unit, talwôn.

Another miss here, but three distinct strands of naming.

English: buttercup
German: Butterblume

French: bouton d'or
Spanish: botón de oro

Italian: ranuncolo

Probably not worth posting any more of the three-stranders, as there will be shedloads out there.

Speaking of which (and this is via google translate, so I'm aware there may be synonymous cognates that just haven't come up)...

English: shed
French: hangar (not counting as a similar cognate because hangars are pretty different to sheds, right? Or is this cheating?)
German: Schuppen
Spanish: cobertizo
Italian: capannone

Are there any resources in English that let you trace foreign etymology, like etymonline?

Dunno. I hope fh can help us.

What about this kind of thing:
En: the honeysuckle
Es: la madreselva
Fr: le chèvrefeuille
De: das Geißblatt

So here we have the Spanish being the wonderful "mother (of the) jungle" and both the German and the French meaning "goat leaf," with the constituent parts for "goat" and "leaf" being unrelated.

The word for it in Czech is pretty cool:
http://www.omniglot.com/blog/?p=3363

Welsh too, on that same page.

Wiktionary is pretty good for English web sites with foreign etymologies, emily.

Shed has some hidden cognates... Italian capannone = Spanish cabana, and Spanish cobertizo = English cover, for example. Badger is another where they look quite disparate but turn to be all pretty much from the same origin!

(not counting as a similar cognate because hangars are pretty different to sheds, right? Or is this cheating?)

That's a pretty deep question, and it's why I was harping on the fact that cognates have similar origins, not meanings. If you start with an English word like shed, you've got to also consider similar English words such as hut, hide, cover, blind, lean-to, shelter, even stuff like gazebo or house.

But not for this game, surely? Those are far too wide. It's not about "does this word have a cognate in English/French/Spanish/German?" but "does this thing have an expression that is a cognate in English/French/Spanish/German?" The reason why I was unsure about hangar is that you can make a case that a hangar is synonymous with shed (it's just a big one), whereas something like "cover" is not synonymous. Metonymy, meronymy, etc etc, those things change language and give us interesting branches. Just because 'chevalier' is from the same root as 'cheval', it doesn't mean we discount 'horse'.

Wait, the second question isn't even phrased right, I don't think. How about "Does this thing have a pan-language consistent cognate from whence it draws its name?"

i think its funny that almost every language - european language - uses a variation of maiz for the word corn except english. even the dutch and german is from maiz and the word corn comes from germany (word for seed).

not funny ha ha, but i'd never really thought about it.

I think your formulation is pretty close, emil.y.

Just investigated
En: the hummingbird
Sp: El picaflor
Pt: o beija-flor

which in most other languages seems to take more or less the scientific name 'colibri.'

So this is what we kind of expect: two interesting colorful distinct words, but then a variant of one of those and then the whole thing dead-ends in the scientific name. And this is why it is kind of interesting that the winners in this thread were able to hold on for so long and not get absorbed into another word. Is it only wishful thinking on our part or are they something more special and unique than mere statistical outliers?

"Does this thing have a pan-language consistent cognate from whence it draws its name?"

Well, take shed as an example. What are the essential properties of a shed for English speakers? Do those properties correspond exactly with the properties of things you have chosen from other languages as equivalents of shed? You can match some aspects, especially if you've specified a particular context, but often you'll end up with a thing in Spanish or German that has incomplete (but sufficient) shedness, or multiple things that satisfy your criteria for shedness. Some of these things will have cognates, and some will not. What, for example, is difference between the words cobertizo, tinglado, and galpón? They all mean shed in Spanish, but all three have separate etymologies.

Maybe that sounds philosophical, but in translation work or etymological research it's a concrete problem. If we're starting from an English thing, we probably want to consider a lot of synonyms in our search for cognates. And the more languages we are searching across, the more abstract that thing is going to get.

I'd search this way: find a common thing where English uses a Celtic word, German uses a Germanic one, Spanish uses something from Arabic, French something from Latin, and Italian something from Greek or even Turkish.

What are the essential properties of a shed for English speakers? Do those properties correspond exactly with the properties of things you have chosen from other languages as equivalents of shed?

See, I'm very interested in this, and it informs my choices and discussion here, I just don't follow you all the way into widening the synonyms until they're no longer synonyms. My boundaries are blurry, I'll accept, but it's a case of you know a shed when you see one, and you know when a shed is no longer a shed.

Having said that, of course your contributions are very interesting! I just think trying to discount stuff ruins the game, whereas I accept fully that discounting stuff is essential to real linguistic work.

English brogue (from Irish)
Spanish dialecto (from Ancient Greek)
French patois (from Old Frnech paw/foot)
German Mundart (from Old High German)
Italian vernacolo (from Latin domestic/home-born slave)

...this is of course cheating big-time, because dialect and vernacular are present in English, Spanish, French, and Italian, while brogue is a little over-specific. Still!

You've got a good chance of finding non-cognate English and German words with similar meaning due to English wandering quite far, but Spanish/French/Italian is always going to present a big danger... they're almost always related!

That said...
English glasses
Spanish anteojos
French lunettes
German Brille
Italian occhiali

I guess you could sub in Spanish gafas, since ojo and occhi are cognates.

How do you people even do this?

That's why I made Italian optional to give us a fighting chance with the Romance languages. Otherwise occhiali and anteojos would have got you. Although you could have swapped in gafas. (xp!)

Oh, Wiktionary is a big grip, xpost to myself.

Uh, help, not grip.

This is the best thread, very Language Log / Hat.

wood
bois (French)
legno (Italian)
madera (Spanish)
Holz (German)

En: the leg
Fr: la jambe
Sp: la pierna
Ge: das Bein

Good thing Italian optional because
It: la gamba

Possible spoiler or marrer of perfection:
Latin word "perna" root of "la pierna" looks like it might be related to Latin word "pes" source of French word for foot "le pied"
Fact that "das Bein" etymologically related to the English word "bone," or so Ezekiel says.

Speaking of logs:
English log
French rondin
Spanish leño
Italian ceppo
German Baumstamm (or... Log)

you figure something like "kneecap" could have shaken out a lot of different ways.

perna in Latin probably maps out to peroneal in English (Wikipedia says via Greek perone), no reason it should have anything to do with pied (Latin pes), anatomically easily distinguishable.

How do you people even do this?

― Margaret Vegemite Sanger (Leee), Sunday, February 24, 2013 11:11 PM (29 minutes ago)

fh, I am starting to suspect you were coming up with strict rules as a way of stalling until you came up with some of your own;)

I looked for log b/c of mentioning Language Log. Google Translate has Log way more common than Baumstann in German.

Fuck, en
Foutre, fr
Ficken, de
Follar, es
Kneppe, da
Neuken, nl

Kill, en
Tuer, fr
Uccidere, it
Töte, de
Matar, es
Dræbe, da
Doden, nl

That's pretty good, but isn't the German one a noun but the others verbs? What's the German word, umbringen?

The other thing is that these languages are "foreign" but they are so much a part of Western Culture (Insert ironic/moronic square quotes, Gandhi citation if needed) - music/philosophy/President's Day Free Hulu Streaming Criterions,etc- that it ends up that you don't have to try as hard as you might think to be exposed to them.

Still highly recommend this book which is all about what happens when people learn multiple languages http://www.babelnomore.com/.

Sorry, töte should be töten for part of speech parallelism.

Though umbringen is better, since töten is cognate with doden <== fhazel rule.

See, I'm very interested in this, and it informs my choices and discussion here, I just don't follow you all the way into widening the synonyms until they're no longer synonyms. My boundaries are blurry, I'll accept, but it's a case of you know a shed when you see one, and you know when a shed is no longer a shed.

You can see the blurriness coming into play in the last few examples though... a word like wood with related term forest. In English both "forest" and "wooden material" can be collapsed into one word, wood while Spanish has madera and bosque which cannot be used interchangeably. But French has bois, a cognate of bosque, as an acceptable word for both "forest" and "wooden material". And English does have the word bosk meaning small forest. And the word material in English is a cognate of the Spanish word for wood.

As a native English speaker, you know what's a shed and what is not a shed, but once you say the thing the Spanish call a cobiertazo is a shed, that doesn't mean you know what's a cobiertazo and what isn't. They intersect, but they aren't necessarily congruent. That's going to affect what qualifies as a cognate, even in the stricter sense we're using for this game.

fh, I am starting to suspect you were coming up with strict rules as a way of stalling until you came up with some of your own;)

Heh... I had to let go of my stricter definition of non-cognate before I could really get into it :) I still think it would be quite a prize to find a five-language list of total non-cognates with very similar meanings! If there even are any.

Wow, never knew material was related to madera. Don't think that breaks it though. Although I have to admit I too thought there might be some confusion between "wood, that is still in the tree" and "wood, that is ready to be firewood" but couldn't work it out and I am tired and needing to go to sleep.

Toad, en
Kröte, de
Crapaud, fr
Sapo, es
Rospo, it

So you are still not buying *Shark* and *Butterfly*? Because of Icelandic?

Are toad and Kröte not related then?

Funny thing about toad is trying to get Spanish speakers to sort out the mapping between toad and frog and rana and sapo. Finally had to resort to asking "which do Frenchmen eat and which did the Conquistadors lick and experience hallucinations?"

Wiktionary is cagey with the etymology, saying that in English it's unclear. :-P