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

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.

Pig, maybe:

F: Cochon
G: Schwein
I: Cerdo
S: Maiale

Is that the primary pig-as-animal word in each language? i can see there's a lot of pig-as-food and synonym overlap (pork/porc/porco, swine/suino).

I was going to suggest:
(en) grape
(de) Traube
(fr) raisin
(es) uva

But the English comes from a French word for a bunch of grapes which has a close cousin in Italian, so I don't think I'm going to be allowed this one. Also the Italian is the same as the Spanish, so there are probably no more languages to add the pile.

en: hourglass
de: Sanduhr
fr: sablier
es: reloj de arena
it: clessidra

Early medieval technology struck me as the most likely fertile ground for this game, being the coincidence of new things, difficult travel and the disintegration of Latin.

Pizza Hut should change its name to Pizza Hat and be done with it IMO.

Grape seems to work despite the various near collisions. Hourglass, I dunno, with all those words for sand, even if they end up bring of different origin, has that same potential problem I had with honeysuckle, compound words based on the same underlying concept even if the constituent words are unrelated. Maybe these should be allowed but under a separate category.

Heartbreaking to find non-cognates in the latin languages, then it turns out English is stinking the place up:

de: Ziegel
es: ladrillo
it: mattone (though NB also laterizio)
fr: brique
en: brick (I was sure this'd be indigenous!)

Thanks. That's one I used to have on my list to investigate.

I always knew the German as Backstein and figured Brick was somehow related to it. Although maybe I was secretly scared away by charcoal briquettes.

I: Cerdo
S: Maiale

Is that the right way round? I've never heard of 'cerdo', but I heard the word 'maiale' a lot in Italy.

Yes, wrong way round, my screw up.

I think this works?

de: Rüsselkäfer
es: gorgojo
it: tonchio
fr: charançon
en: weevil!

Oh, the Swedish is like the Finnish, "poika".
This happens a lot in Swedish, I think Finnish is an official language in Sweden. Just looked up "butterfly" in a Swedish dictionary and got "fjäril" which I guess is from Finnish but it turns out they also have "sommarfågel."

It's the other way around, Finnish has many derived from Swedish, because the area now known as Finland was part of Sweden for hundreds of years. (Finnish is an official language in Sweden mostly because a lot of Finns immigrated there during the 20th century, so Finnish has hasn't had much of an influence on Swedish.) "Fjäril" is Swedish, in Finnish "butterfly" is "perhonen", which I assume has Finno-Ugric roots and isn't an Indo-European cognate.

So, my theory, which is mine is that there is a certain chess piece, which moves diagonally on one specified shade of light or dark throughout the entire game which is called

En: the bishop
Fr: le fou
De: der Läufer
Es: el alfil

The bishop, the fool, the runner, and (from the Persian) the elephant rider(!?).

This is pretty interesting, in Finnish it's called "lähetti", which means "messenger". It probably comes from "the runner" (the Swedish word for the chess piece is "the runner" too); I assume "runner" once once upon a time synonymous for "messenger" in Germanic languages, even though it isn't anymore.

As a side note, when I was young and wasn't that well versed in English, I was confused about what chess piece "knight" was supposed to be... In Finnish (as well as German and Swedish) the piece is called "steed" or "horse", in accordance with how it looks like. Took me a while to figure out the horse simply represents the cavalry, which is the explanation for the English word.

knight in most languages is rider.....rittter / chevalier etc

hence knight rider being tautology ;_;

surely cheval/caballero come from latin caballus=horse ? maybe rider came first tho.

sorry chevalier I meant. tho of course cheval = horse in French

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).

When I started studying German, I was amused by the fact that in almost all the other European languages the words for "television" and "piano" were variants of those words, but in German they are "Fernseher" and "Klavier".

Klavier is an interesting case in general: it comes from the original Latin word for keyboard instruments, but when the pianoforte was invented, seems pretty much all the other European languages accepted the new name for the new instrument, except Germans, who stuck to the old word. I wonder if there's some cultural reason for that?

That whole chain has a great collection of meanings - something like 'gentleman' in Spanish, and 'a bit reckless' in English, as well as free beer for bands before gigs.

fernsehen is sort of the same notion as television (looking into the distance)

I'm talking about knight/caballero/ritter there, not klaviers.

or maybe germans think of it as exactly looking AT the windowpane

fernsehen is sort of the same notion as television (looking into the distance)

Yeah, I know... But with a lot of 20th century inventions (microscope, radio, etc) most European languages tended to borrow a foreign word instead of coming up with an indigenous name for it. Though I guess with television the explanation is simply that Germany was the first country to mass-produce televisions, and hence it made sense they came up with a indigenous word for it instead of borrowing an obscure foreign term.

there was a degree of sniffiness in england about 'television' because it combined greek prefix and latin verb, maybe german pedants felt likewise but even more strongly

I like the fact that everywhere from Greece to Russia to France to Germany has a variation on "medusa" for jellyfish and the English were like "nah, it's a fish made out of jelly, we're calling it that".

A similar word is "ananas", which is the same in pretty much all the European languages, except in English, where they apparently were like, "that looks like an apple with pines, that's what we call it!".

I think there's a stronger & longer purist we'll-make-our-own-compounds-thank-you tradition in German - like this guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_Heinrich_Campe
seems to have had more traction than William Barnes in English.

Ah yes, "The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it." - C.P. Scott.

"Fernseher" is a direct retranslation of the classical components of "television", tele being Greek for "at a distance". "das Telefon" used to be "der Fernsprecher", on the same principle.

There are others like that, where they've reinvented a classical compound word by splitting into component parts and translating each into German; some element names are like this, e.g. Wasserstoff for hydrogen and Sauerstoff for oxygen (oxygen is from the Greek for "producing bitterness", from its role in acid formation, or... something, I'm no scientist).

If anyone is now thinking "if only English had done that too", you may like to read this short piece by Poul Anderson.

I am pleasingly confused by the German "Handy", which appears to be an adoption of an English word which doesn't exist, or at least, doesn't mean "mobile phone".

xp thanks woof, looking forward to reading this

television must've been called something like picturebox here at first

In Finnish, the colloquial term for "television" during it's early years was "seeing radio".

Barnes's Outline of English Speech-craft is quite something btw
http://archive.org/details/anoutlineenglis00barngoog

I don't like seeing English words borrowed then used both non-indigenously and wrong - 'un parking' or 'un shampooing' (that's Turkish, but the -ing isn't)