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

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!

I always get confusion with that and a certain Tom Jobim lyric.

hahaha, my first impression of temperamatita was "what? paint killer?"

en: toad - From Middle English tode, toode, tade, tadde, from Old English *tāde, a shortening of tādie, tādiġe (“toad”), of unknown origin, possibly from Proto-Germanic. Cognate with Scots tade, taid, taed, ted (“toad”). Compare also Danish tudse (“toad”), possibly from the same root; also Swedish tåssa, tossa (“toad”), Old English tāxe (“toad”), Old English tosca (“toad”) by contrast.

fr: crapaud - Probably from Frankish *krappō, *krappa (“hook”) (because of a toad’s hooked feet) +‎ -aud. Compare Catalan gripau, Occitan, grapaut.

es: sapo - Unknown, possibly from Iberian, cognate with Basque apo.

it: rospo - Uncertain, possibly of Germanic origin

de: kröte - From Middle High German krotte, kröte, krëte, from Old High German chrota, krota, kreta (“toad”), from Proto-Germanic *krudō, *kredō (“toad”), from Proto-Indo-European *guredʰ- (“toad”). Cognate with Middle Low German krōde (“toad”), dated Dutch krodde (“toad”).

what's the word for toad-sharpener in Italian?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOCxplCFYCE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erIxsjOAKc4

This is very close but slightly unsatisfactory

en: raccoon
sp: mapache
fr: raton laveur
de: Waschbär

because the German and the French both have the idea of washing, and Spanish has the term "oso lavador," not sure which term is more common in Peninsular vs. American Spanish. But we also have

it: procione
pt: guaxinim

My wife who's from Costa Rica says she's never heard the name "oso lavador", mapache is the only word for raccoon she knows.

In Finnish we call it "pesukarhu", which also means "wash bear". Probably comes from German via Swedish, as raccoons don't live here, so we wouldn't have an "indigenous" word for them.

en: spats
es: polainas
fr: guêtres
de: Gamaschen

is ruined slightly by French origin of "gaiters" and by the fact that spats are short and gaiters are long, whereas afaik the same word is used for both in other languages, or really only for the long form.

(En) bird
(Es) pájaro
(Fr) oiseau
(De) Vogel
(It) uccello