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

False friends

Which are called by basically the same name across the board:
faux amis
falsos amigos
falsche Freunde

strictly speaking, false friends and false cognates aren't exactly the same... two words that appear to have a shared etymology but do not are false cognates, such as English light and German blitz "lightning" for example. Two words that sound alike but have different meanings are false friends, and they usually are cognates (English molest and Spanish molestar "to bother") but don't have to be (English galena "lead sulfide" and Portuguese galinha "hen").

That reminds me of that embarrassing incident with the lead sulfide on my Portuguese holiday...

Isn't that the name of a Fairport Convention album?

liege and lief are false cognates

I'm glad this thread made me dig out Partridge's Origins. Otherwise, I would have not made a connection (although it's totally obvs now that I think about it) between hymnal and hymen.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8248/8527358827_4213032133_c.jpg

that's just a random page! there 971 others!

Well, that clears up where the English word "haversack" comes from at least.

I'm pretty sure French got it from English

OED lists both the French havresac and German habersack as sources for the English, so it seems like things are not cut and dried.

The French seem to think they got it from German. Haber and haver for oats is common to both English and German, apparently.

Man, I wish English had ended up with oatsack as the word for backpack.

Weird thing across the US is the varying use of the terms "bag" "sack" or "pack." Vestigial trace of the Old Weird America.

http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_109.html

don't forget poke!

Ha, thanks.

I do know that the Spanish equivalent of "to buy a pig in a poke," from the opposite point of view, is "dar gato por liebre" - to give a cat for a hare.

this reminds me of that time i resisted buying all of the DARE volumes

confident use of the past tense there.

once the sale was over i felt safe from dropping $400+ on recreational dictionaries

but it's a vacation... in your mind!

The only vacation that matters.

en: dog
de: hund
fr: chien
es: perro

I assume Italian "cane" is a cognate with French "chien", and of course other cognates lurk (hund/hound).

Fine, I can admit that I regret not shelling out for the DARE.

en: hat
cz: klobouk
dt: hoed
fi: hattu
fr: chapeau
de: Hut
gr: καπέλο
hi: topi
it: capello
pl: kapelusz
ro: pălărie
ru: shlyapa
sp: sombrero
sw: hatt

idk what's up with czech and romanian there but that's a pretty clear romance/germanic split

шапка is probably my favourite example of the problems that come with trying to identify Russian words by visual similarity with English letters.

Another page from that book -- its browseability illustrated here with a page featuring the following four words:

advice after affair afternoon
or
after afternoon affair advice
and so on

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8516/8597304343_6f184b71c5_b.jpg

wow, afternoon looks like a winner!

also, cannot recommend this book enough:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0816652724/

or its cheaper cousin by the same author:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0195387074/

he is fun to read!

wow, afternoon looks like a winner!
Close. But aren't the "mit" in "Mittag" and the "mi" in "midi" related?

Will be checking out Word Origins, thanks.

is mittag used differently from midday?

Don't think so.

Hm. Brief search indicates the French is coming from Latin and the German and English more from something Germanic.

yeah, they all seem to lead back to the same Proto-Indo-European root (*medhyo meaning "middle")... including the Italian, which got by me initially, it's basically "post-meridian."

Plant known in English as monkshood or wolfsbane has all sorts of great names in various languages including

D: Eisenhut , "iron hat"
P: carro-de-venus "carriage of Venus"

Full list here:http://irapl.altervista.org/botany/main.php?taxon=Aconitum+napellus

Wikipedia has some good names too:

Aconitum (pron.: /ˌækəˈnaɪtəm/ A-co-ní-tum),[1] also known as "the queen of poisons", aconite, monkshood, wolf's bane, leopard's bane, women's bane, devil's helmet or blue rocket

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aconitum

One old reference has in it a listing for a Danish term, Blauemunke- "Blue Monk." Who knew?

Wikipedia table of chess piece names:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_piece#Piece_names

Wikipedia links to this interesting article, originally written in Finnish: http://www.shakki.net/kerhot/KemTS/nap-pieces.htm

hmm interesting common groupings for "bishop"

And thank you for this:

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

― Liz Phair Dinkum (Leee), Monday, 25 February 2013 05:29 (1 month ago) Permalink

hinter has a common root with hind.

I was wondering about Poulenc/Pollo -- seems likely but the spelling and pronunciation have kind of obscured it. German "huhn" (presumably the origin of "hen") is nothing like the english "chicken."

German has "Küken" for chick (in the general bird sense) - I would have guessed that's cognate but not sure.

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

hey, that's a really good one!

Chicken is a relatively recent term, though, isn't it? Weren't they once primarily called 'fowl'?

Pencil is awesome. Note that the a word spelled exactly the same as, but presumably unrelated to, the Italian word for 'pencil', 'matita', appears in Tom Jobim's "The Waters of March" in the context of the "Matita Pereira," which is some kind of mischief-making magical bird (don't know if it has to do with pear trees either). Ctr-F through this Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saci_(Brazilian_folklore)

Click through doesn't quite work due to interpretation of closing paren, but just click through again after "Did you mean:"

More pencils:

Karandash - Russian
Ołówek - Polish
Tuzka - Czech

In Swedish it's "penna", which must be a gognate of "pencil".

btw anyone have awebsite where i can look up the translation of a word in multiple languages at one time. rather than having to google translate one language at a time. looking for something kind of like that awesome multiple language dictionary shown upthread.

I'll be happy to take requests in a week or two when my books are all unpacked. That's all I've got!

have read something about "turkey" that is relevant to thread, people everywhere always assume this bird comes from some other land and name it accordingly, therefore turkeys are from space.