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

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

Nah, I think shark is pretty solid! Icelandic has a cognate with the German word, but you never said anything about Icelandic!

WIth the cagey etymology toad is looking good. Leee, you are the Come From Behind Kid.

LOL thanks James!

And thank you for this:

Behind, en
Hinter, de
Detrás, es
Derrière, fr
Bag, da
Achter, nl

Wait, can we swap in Italian and swap out French and Spanish respectively to make squirrel and bat work as quadruplets?

This thread/fil/faden/hilo/garn delivers.

Another interesting one that illustrates f hazel's point (unless I'm misunderstanding): potato (derived from Spanish batata), where the roots among Dutch, German, and French are not necessarily cognate, but they all translate literally to something like apple/tuber of the earth (aardappel, Kartoffel, pomme de terre).

but it's interesting that two distant languages both call it earth apples (pomme de terre (fr), aardappel (nl)), while the German Kartoffel goes straight to a Romance language (tartuficolo (it)).

i immediately looked up tuna to see if any languages transliterated to "chicken of the sea" and was verrrry disappointed.

the shark thing is solid but in French, even though it's not used as often you can say un squale, which is exactly like the Italian squalo.

This thread is ILX's Puppy Bowl counterprogramming to OSCARS 2013.

Potato is a twice corrupted mangling of "batata" from Taino (indigenous Haitian/Caribbean language) which explains the lack of latin-ness en español.

But that is a small sweet potato, not what we think of when think of potatoes.

The large white potato was known in Quechua/ancient Incan as "papa",.. which is why in South America, they defer to papa rather than patata... they've been eating them for many millenniums longer than the rest of us.

Leider, squirrel ain't gonna work none, cos in DE it's das Eichhornchen. (the -chen suffix implies small/cute)
from die Eichen (the oaks), die Eichel (the acorn)
"Dichhornetwas" doesn't exist, Dickhornschaf is a bighorn sheep. ("thickhorn", literally translated).
Thus, it being "Das Eichhornhen" it's too close to the French & Dutch

:(

mist a "c" ther, din't i?

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).

Sorry Scott, maize is totally a word in British English.

Shark is actually pretty disparate... German and Icelandic words for shark are cognates (Haifisch and hákarl), but I can't chase down much else!

The Scandinavian languages all have Hai or Haj, i think, and the Russian (Akula) also comes from the same root. I like the speculation that Shark comes from a Mayan dialect.

Leider, squirrel ain't gonna work none, cos in DE it's das Eichhornchen. (the -chen suffix implies small/cute)
from die Eichen (the oaks), die Eichel (the acorn) Thus, it being "Das Eichhornhen" it's too close to the French & Dutch

Well, only Dutch. The French écureuil comes from Old Latin sciurus which is borrowed from the Ancient Greek σκίουρος meaning... squirrel. Not related to the Germanic cognates. Middle English actually had the cognate aquerne with the German Eichhorn but squirrel borrowed from French replaced it.

I was going to say that squirrel and ecureuil would have the same root. I think 'éc...' from 'sc...' is a common thing in french - right now can only think of Écosse for Scotland (presumably the root there is whatever's the Latin form of Scozia) but I'm sure there are lots of others.

École's another one (school)

eichureuil

English - Lollipop
French - Sucette
German - Lutscher
Italian - Lecca-Lecca
Spanish - Piruli
Russian - Ledenets na palochke

idk if that works. French and Germans presumably suck them, Italians lick them and Russians think of them more clinically as a sweet on a stick.

And most importantly, there is France Gall song about them.

D'oh! I didn't notice that the Italian scoiattolo is related to both the English and French for squirrel so doesn't work as a substitute.

Also, the chess thing is really a, horse of a different color in that it is not really an etymological question but I find it interesting in its own right.