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

^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…

yes, my rutherglen gran called them slaters

ugh my alice post makes more sense once you substitute bishops for the first mention of rooks (but keep rooks for the final paragraph)

it is too hot here in hackney

Mark, are you familiar with the Barrington Bayley story "The Exploration of Space"?

might have read it as a teenager -- when i devoured a ton of stuff like that, mostly in gollancz collections from the library -- but the synopsis i just looked up didn't ring a bell

(eg i dimly recall a story in which jabberwocky was a code to enter the 4th dimension?)

i also just checked a 1990 edn of gardner's annoted alice and he was still saying the same thing about bishops: "Although Carroll never mentions bishops (perhaps out of deference to the clergy), they can be seen clearly in Tenniel's drawing. Isaac Asimov's mystery story "The Curious Omission," in his Tales of the Black Widowers, derives from Carroll's curious omission of chess bishops."

(Gardner also hovers round the idea that Tweedledum and Tweedledee are possibly rooks.)

(the jabberwocky story is lewis padgett's "mimsy were the borogoves")

I was listening to Ecstasy of St. Theresa and reading up on the etymology of "sussurate" (although I was actually listening to Fluidtrance Centauri) and I figured "whisper" might be fun to look into since most languages might have a bespoke imitative/onomatopoeic form...

English: whisper
German: Flüstern
French: chuchotement
Spanish: susurro
Italian: bisbiglio

Pretty much every Romance language plus English has cognates for the Latin "sussurate" and "murmur" plus German has an alternate noun "Whispern". English ended up using a word derived from "whistle" as the go-to for whisper, just to be different. The French chuchotement has an older form that shows up in the English "chuchotage" which means "the interpretation or translation of speech in a whisper to a single person in proximity to other people" which is cool and I hadn't heard before. Spanish also has "cuchicheo" which at first glance should be related to the French but both languages claim it themselves. The similar spelling might be what is fooling me, plus it's always risky to claim borrowing with onomatopoeic words. The German is unrelated to English's "flustered" which is Scandinavian in origin ("to make slightly drunk"!). And the Italian word is just awesome.

This is a fucking magnificent thread, by the way. This shit is what ILX excels at.

English: pillow
German: Kissen
French: oreiller
Spanish: almohada
Italian: cuscino
Portuguese: travesseiro
Welsh: gobennydd

Wow, not only Italian but Portuguese as well! Nice. Interesting that English pillow comes from Latin via Germanic and through Old English. I would never have guessed that pillow and polvo (Spanish for dust) are cognates!

Full marks! Although is it true that Kissen and cuscino are unrelated?

Well, no... the German comes from Old High German kussīn which is borrowed from Old French cussin with the same Latin root as the Italian cuscino. But it's a winning set because the English and German aren't cognates and Alba found non-cognates in Spanish, Italian, *and* Portuguese which is hard!

PS a good site for looking up etymologies for German words is https://www.dwds.de/ which is in German but can be deciphered using Google translate and a bit of sleuthing to figure out the abbreviations (for example if you look up Kissen there's afrz/ which is Alt französisch or Old French).

english: pencil
german: bleistift
french: crayon
spanish: lapiz
italian: matita

portuguese is lapis unfortunately :/

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

― Jibe, Wednesday, April 24, 2013 6:53 PM (four years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

foiled by not pressing "show all messages" before ctrl+fing :c

Happens to the best of us

But you can get there with pen!

English: pen
German: Stift
Spanish: bolígrafo
Portuguese: caneta
French: stylo

Italian "penna" being obviously out of the running, Portuguese steps up. The French word comes from English "stylograph" as does the related Spanish "estilógrafo" but "bolígrafo" wasn't borrowed but coined. And I guess if we really wanted to use Italian's "penna" we could go for the British English "biro" instead of "pen"!

English: knickers
French: culotte
Spanish: bragas
German: Schlüpfer
Portuguese: Calcinhas

Great thread to stumble on!

IT Negozio
E Shop
G Laden
FR Atelier
SP Tienda

I forgot to add the Italian knickers: mutandine!

english: wren
french: roitelet
italian: scricciolo
spanish: reyezuelo
portuguese: carriça
german: zaunkönig (means fenceking!)
dutch: winterkoninkje (winter-king, so overlaps w/german i guess)
danish: gærdesmutte
welsh: dryw
finnish: peukaloinen

french, spanish and italian are maybe cognates soundwise tho they don't look it by eye

english: witch
french: sorcière
italian: strega
spanish: bruja (portuguese: bruxa)
german: hexe (dutch/danish: heks)
welsh: wrach
finnish: noita

english: lump (german: klumpen) (welsh: lwmp)
french: bosse
italian: grumo
spanish: terrón
portuguese: nódulo
dutch: brok
finnish: kyhmy

E Billow
F Onduler
G Bauschen
I Flutto
SP Ola

Great work last month!

Came to post about an amusing German word I just learned is

der Bubikopf

which means
1) A bob haircut- German wikipedia features a picture of Louise Brooks
2) The plant Soleirolia soleirolii, which has all kinds of names in English

Wondering what amusing names that plant and haircut have in other languages

There is also

der Bubikragen - the Peter Pan collar, wonder what other picturesque names it might have

E Billow
F Onduler
G Bauschen
I Flutto
SP Ola

Earlier mention of water itt:

Hmm, so how do I interpret the colors for the etymology map of, say, water? Because "eau," "agua," "water/wasser/etc." are correspond to PIE?

― Matt Groening's Cousin (Leee), Monday, November 11, 2013 11:50 AM (three years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There are three PIE roots meaning "water" from which contemporary languages derive their terms for water, and each color corresponds to one of them. The shades of each color refer (I am guessing) to terms that have younger common ancestors that ultimately go back to the PIE root.

― erry red flag (f. hazel), Monday, November 11, 2013 12:00 PM (three years ago) Bookmark

https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bubikopf
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubikragen
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubikopf_(Frisur)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soleirolia

english: lump (german: klumpen) (welsh: lwmp)
french: bosse
italian: grumo
spanish: terrón
portuguese: nódulo
dutch: brok
finnish: kyhmy

Dammit, French!

english: hideous (german: Scheußlich) (welsh: Yn wych)
french: hideux
italian: orrendo
spanish: repulsivo
portuguese: medonho
dutch: afschuwelijk
finnish: hirveä

http://languagehat.com/butterfly/

A fun etymology-related game I have been playing lately is to find one of the legion of lists of "untranslatable" words a la this one (which has lovely illustrations):

https://ellafrancessanders.com/untranslatable-words-from-other-cultures/

and the try and find English translations for as many of them as I can, ideally single-word, by looking at rarely used or archaic terms... or simply starting from the assumption that nothing is truly untranslatable between human languages and being poetically obstinate.

for example, the aforementioned list has the Swedish mångata, "the glimmering, road-like reflection that the moon creates on water" which in English is... moonglade! Which the OED first attests back in 1867.

I find a bit of googling the untranslatable words to be helpful to establish they really mean what the lists say they do, some are just flat-out wrong.

and then, not and the...

Oh, that is a cool endeavour. Please post more if you're up for it.

We have a Finnish word for the same concept as mångata too, it's "kuunsilta", literally "moon's bridge".

i love it!! moonglade!

also reminds me of the grant hart song
you're the moonglade, but you're not the moon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTH4Zu8gleA

Japanese: Komorebi
This is the word the Japanese have for when sunlight filters through the trees - the interplay between the light and the leaves

- surely this is 'dappling'

ooh, excellent idea LL!

along those lines, there is komorebi (木漏れ日) "sunlight that filters through the leaves of trees".

for this I would go with sun-dappled, which is an adjective and not a noun but brings us the same visceral image:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQbm2L9hKSs

(haha, xpost!)

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

― Jibe, Wednesday, April 24, 2013 6:53 PM (four years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Could the Indonesian 'jayus' be… an 'anti-joke'?

On second thought, 'anti-joke' adds intent to the equation, so it's not quite the same thing.

En:
Fr: taille-crayon
Es: sacapuntas
It: affilacoltelli
De:Spitzer

Hit enter too bloody soon, English is sharpener, unsurprisingly following on from pencils above

Actually I think pencil sharpener is temperamatita in Italian too

The etymology of Italian's matita for pencil is interesting, apparently it's from ematite, or hematite, which they used for writing? Apparently there is a ton of hematite on Elba, compared to the giant graphite deposit found in England in the 16th century... which leads us to (mistakenly) call the stuff in pencils lead!