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

They are from the same language family (Uralic) but Hungarian diverged from other languages in this family (Finnish, Estonian, many others) a long time ago... they aren't mutually intelligible at all. Remember that English is from the Germanic language family and it's not mutually intelligible with any other Germanic language. So the relationship is very meaningful linguistically, but in terms of learning or speaking the language... not all that meaningful.

Thanks. Even though English and German are not mutually intelligible as you say, there is still enough vocabulary overlap at least in the basic words, and similarity in grammatical structure that once you do start to study German you never doubt the relationship, whereas with a more distantly related Indo-European language with a pretty much completely different vocabulary, Russian or Hindi, say, you can tell yourself "yeah, I guess I can see how the grammar is sort of set up along the same lines with lots of different bells and whistles," and with something as different as Welsh or Irish you say "I guess I'll take your word for it."

DANG that sounds like fun!! We did that in grad school, but only once and not deeply enough for my liking, plus my genius fell on deaf ears. Tell me what you learned about the Popol Vuh!!

So I reminded myself that those Uralic languages are not Indo-European so they are already distant enough, and I am presuming within that family, Finnish and Hungarian are quite different other than "OMG, this is a really tough language for outsiders to learn!"

http://cnt.likealaugh.org/165CandacewithanA/20130604-030047-165-224.jpg

I am easily amused.

Ha! I don't think I will share this with mein Mann!

You know what makes me angry? People using the American flag as a signifier for generic 'English'. FUCK YOOOOOOOU.

Actually, so angry that I didn't notice they switch between UK and US flags in that macro (arbitrarily?)

Seems like a collaborative project, given the language differencies.

Is this for real? http://ainolicious.tumblr.com/post/65341249757/english-a-dog-swedish-what-english-the

Well yeah, it's a list of the Finnish word for "dog" with various case endings and clitics. (As you may or may not know, in Finno-Ugrian languages case endings are typically used instead of prepositions.) In the third comment she gradually starts adding two and then three and even four case endings and clitics to the word, which is technically correct, as there's no limit to the number of those a word can have, but in practice it's kinda rare to see anyone use more than two, since it starts to sound artificial.

Like, the last word in the list, "koirinennekokaan" literally means "Even with your dog?", where "-i" = a plural form denoting that there is more than one person who has the dog, "-nen" = "with", "-ne" = "your", "ko" = a clitic denoting that the word is used as a question, "kaan" = "even". The word is intelligible to a native speaker, but it's mostly too complex for common use.

If you wanted to get this idea across in Finnish, I think it would more common simply say "Ettekö edes koiranne kanssa?". In this case sentence the "-ko" clitic is turned into a separate question word "ettekö" (which is in the plural form, so we know there is more than one dog owner the question is addressed to), and the clitic denoting "even" and the case ending denoting "with" are also turned into words of their own ("edes", "kanssa"), with only the case ending denoting "your" ("-nne") still attached to the word "dog", as it cannot be separated from it.

(Though in Finnish vernacular it's pretty common to use a separate pronoun denoting ownership instead of the case ending, but that's grammatically incorrect. So you hear people say "teidän koira", where "teidän" = "your" (in plural). The correct way of saying that would be either "teidän koiranne", where you use both the possessive pronoun and the case ending, or just "koiranne", since the pronoun is redundant if the possession is already denoted by the case ending.)

Hm, seems that in place of transliterating Russian names, Italians will often just use the Czech version: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%ABtr_Il%27i%C4%8D_%C4%8Cajkovskij

Pëtr Il'ič Čajkovskij (/ˈpʲɵtr ɪlʲˈjitɕ tɕɪˈkofskʲɪjascolta[?·info]/, in russo: Пётр Ильич Чайковский[?]; spesso traslitterato come Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky o Ciajkovskij) (Kamsko-Votkinsk, 7 maggio 1840[1] – San Pietroburgo, 6 novembre 1893) è stato un compositore russo del romanticismo.

I guess this is the de facto multilingual lexicography thread?

http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/01/23/word_of_the_year_popular_words_this_past_year_from_countries_around_the.html

The Language Council in Norway chose sakte-tv (slow-TV), reflecting the popularity of shows like "National Wood Fire Night," a four-hour discussion of firewood followed by an eight-hour broadcast of a crackling fire. Some of the good competitors were rekkeviddeangst (range anxiety)—the fear that the battery of your electric car will run out before you can get to a charging station—and revelyd (fox sound) because, of course, Ylvis.

Fun! The author of that article, Arika Okrent, has a really neat book on invented languages that everyone should read. Well, who is interesting in conlangs or just interesting things.

Yes, everyone should read that book. That one and Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners, by Michael Erard.[

I guess this is the de facto multilingual lexicography thread?

"Arika Okrent holds a Ph.D. in linguistics and a first-level certification in Klingon."
i thought okrent invented klingon

Close!

Marc Okrand (/ˈmɑrk ˈoʊkrænd/; born July 3rd, 1948) is an American linguist and is most notable as the creator of the Klingon language.

http://ukdataexplorer.com/european-translator/

http://chapmangamo.tumblr.com/

Awesome. Thanks.

Polish firetruck sirens wail in binary!

I guess this is as a good a place to ask this as any... Last weekend we were discussing the Finnish word "hanki", which basically measn "a layer of snow on the ground that hasn't been plowed or otherwise touched", i.e. the thing that covers the earth after a snowfall. And we were kinda wondering, is there a word for this in other languages? If my description wasn't quite clear, here are GIS results for the word "hanki", so you can see what I mean:

https://www.google.fi/search?hl=fi&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1165&bih=822&q=hanki&oq=hanki

hanki panki

The English phrase is "virgin snow", I think?

"Fresh powder", in a skiing context at least. I'd say "fresh snow", otherwise.

hanki panki

Nice, but the word is pronounced more like "hunky".

hunky punky then

Which is how Americans pronounce it anyway.

Just found a sticker having a red circle containing white left-pointing arrow within and these words:

Drive on the left!
Links Fahren
Conduzca por la izquierda
Conduisez a gauche
Guidate sulla sinistra

Is "left" related to "links," other than starting with the same letter?

Habitaciones
Rooms
Chambres
Zimmer

:)

Back to the butterflies: I have been trying to find out if papilla -> pimple (as in 'lingual papillae') has any shared etymology with papilio -> papillon -> butterfly. I'm thinking they're just similar words, but my google research just tends to throw up pages about words for butterfly in different languages.

papilla is from Latin for nipple, while papilio is Latin for butterfly... probably just similar words.

I think my problem is that etymology sites just go "oh, this is from the Latin" as if there were no other languages before Latin. I realise that it's tough/impossible to follow stuff before Latin, particularly if it goes to a pre-writing stage (then it really is impossible), but... there are fucking years of linguistic development before Latin, have you ever thought that maybe these similar words have a deeper root? But then even writing that out sounds like I have an irrational chip on my shoulder.

etymonline speculates a reduplicated PIE root *pal- 'to touch/feel/shake' for papilio, PIE *pap- 'to swell' for papilla

i don't know if there are any PIE-specific resources on the internet, it's a pretty hard topic to google

ok so in the answers here:

http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1282/why-do-languages-not-share-a-root-for-butterfly

there's a citation:

Etymology
Pā -piliō can reflect reduplication of a root *pl- 'to fly, flutter', which has also served to build the word for 'quail' in BSl. and 'butterfly' in Gm. It seems unlikely that this root *pl- is a very early variant of PIE roots such as *pleu- 'to swim, wander', *pleh3- 'to swim, float', *pelh1- 'to swing'.

from:

Michiel de Vaan. "pāpiliō" in: Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages. Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries Online. Edited by Alexander Lubotsky. Brill, 2012.

otoh this is unavailable w/o a subscription and doesn't seem to have an entry for papilla

---

it looks like your most user-friendly next step would be to go find a copy of the american heritage dictionary of indo-european roots and check out those two, but i suspect this is something you will never be able to answer to your own satisfaction ~

That's pretty good work, man. Thank you.

I think my problem is that etymology sites just go "oh, this is from the Latin" as if there were no other languages before Latin.

The technique by which you get the Latin origin of an English word comes mostly from philology with (hopefully) some application of modern historical linguistics. Once you start talking about Proto-Italic and PIE, you are dealing with entirely reconstructed languages, which is a different set of assumptions and a different kind of evidence. You're still in the domain of etymology, sort of, but when you make the step back from attested languages to reconstructed ones, you're taking a tool used to show the relationships between languages and trying to make it show relationships between words.

Good points, well made (not sarcastic - this is stuff I'm interested in and you've explained well).

http://i.imgur.com/7AeYcfK.jpg

https://s3.amazonaws.com/rapgenius/Homer-Simpson-Doh.jpg

This is what the discussion sounded like while they were making that chart, forks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YClAMYTEuZ0

language log on those butterflies:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=23775&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Have we ever done Foreign Language False Friends? Like
Turkish: tuz - salt
Hungarian: tűz - fire
Russian: туз (tuz) - ace

^There is a lot of this in Julian Rios's Larva

badger (aka brock)
blaireau
dachs
téjon
tasso

already mentioned upthread as in fact NON-non-cognate but worth setting out in full to see the variance anyway (eg dachs and tasso are p close once you think abt it)

quite pleased for some reason also to discover that there are badgers in italy

woodlouse
cloporte
assel
cochinilla
onisco

adding in the dutch for wild invention (and/or correct olfactory observation)
pissebed

... called a slater in Scotland.

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(!?)

(and cf subsquent comments eg from tuomas)

weird thing i have never seen explained (tho it probably has been by now): in lewis carroll's through the looking glass it has been noted that, of the chess pieces featured, there are no rooks -- and commentators (for example martin gardner in the annotated alice) have suggested perhaps there was a mild religious timidity here, given that he was an anglican deacon etc, and presumably had professional dealings with bishops now and then

but of course he DOES feature a pair of messengers, haigha and hatta, "one to come and one to go" -- so as far as germans or swedes or finns are concerned, the piece distinctly does play a part

i wondered if there was a time when the pieces in english were called runners or messengers? or whether LC preferred to fashion jokes based on e.g. the german name (fairly sure he spoke german, tho i forget why i think this)

of course rooks also don't play a part in the book, so…