False friends and other unfortunate coincidences

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Pabappa
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Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences

Post by Pabappa »

the low rate of lexical similarity in IE vs the other hyperborean languages could be due to IE's radical restructuring of its grammar and lexicon, such that even words for basic concepts like fire, water, animal names, etc are no longer atomic roots in PIE, but rather are derived from a root, a suffix, and sometimes a further suffix.

which means that nimi~ name might be a coincidence after all .... remember that the -m doesnt count because its not part of the root. the case for PIE/Uralic being related is almost entirely grammatical, rather than lexical .... but we've got other threads to discuss that.
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Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences

Post by Backstroke_Italics »

So to recap:

1) hnomn and nimi are related because they have multiple elements in common
2) all of those elements but /n/ may be jettisoned if problematic
3) if the remaining single element is insufficient to prove relation, re-introduce the jettisoned elements
4) if the re-introduced elements are problematic, jettison them again
5) repeat

Oh, and borrowings may be made from any stage of Pre-PIE, early PIE, late PIE, early or late Balto-Slavic, early or late Germanic, and when all else fails an unattested intermediate language of undetermined origin. This means that, if FU words that "match" IE have no sound changes in common (like seimen and nimi), one or the other can be attributed to borrowing and the other to genetic inheritence. If three or more words show different sound change trajectories, a circular firing squad may simultaneously relegate all of them to borrowing and attribute all of them to a common proto-language.

In other words, perfectly convincing no problems here.
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Pabappa
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Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences

Post by Pabappa »

since Im the only one in this thread arguing that the words may be related, i assume that sarcasm is aimed at me, but ... please realize that almost none of what you wrote actually pertains to what i say. of course an opinion will look ridiculous if you mash it up with five opposing and mutually contradictory opinions .... while my theory might be a shot in the dark, it certainly doesnt contradict itself.

its a moot point though. the impression i get is that Indo-Uralic supporters believe that PIE stands out from the herd because it underwent a radical restructuring, meaning it has telltale grammar similarities with the much more conservative Uralic, but little lexical overlap.
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Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences

Post by WeepingElf »

Pabappa wrote: 10 Oct 2021 00:19 Why do people so often assume there were loans?
Because the sound correspondences shown by the majority of these items look like the sound substitutions one would expect from loanwords. Look at the vowels, especially - most of the Uralic words in question faithfully reflect PIE ablaut grades and even vowel-colouring effects of laryngeals, which are almost certainly not of Indo-Uralic age as there are no traces of them elsewhere in Uralic. This, of course, doesn't exclude the possibility of actual Indo-Uralic cognates besides these loanwords with less trivial sound correspondences. Especially the morphological resemblances between IE and Uralic are hard to explain otherwise. And @Salmoneus - it indeed seems as if PU was a bit younger than PIE, though not "thousands of years". Rather, a few hundred years.
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Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences

Post by Xonen »

Pabappa wrote: 10 Oct 2021 00:19 Why do people so often assume there were loans? It could just as well be, with such a simple concept, that the word is original to both branches of Indo-Uralic and developed according to now-lost rules, likely changing much more on the IE side than on the Uralic side, from the original root. Again, though, the case is weak, since it relies on the theory that PIE underwent a simplification such as /mm/ > /m/.
The Indo-Uralic hypothesis is, of course, perhaps the most prominent of those alternative explanations I mentioned in my post, but... Basically, see WeepingElf's post above. There are some suspiciously similar-looking grammatical elements (such as the personal pronouns and the accusative ending), but pretty much zero convincing lexical evidence. So it's better to propose loan etymologies, both because they (usually) make more phonetic sense and because this avoids throwing a controversial and probably unprovable hypothetical into the mix.

Salmoneus wrote: 10 Oct 2021 01:37Xonen: There's also the fact that PU is presumably younger - potentially thousands of years younger - than PIE.
Well, there've been numerous proposals on how to revise the timing recently, since until about fifteen years ago it was generally accepted that PU was at least a thousand years older than PIE, which is now understood to be wrong for several reasons. But thousands of years younger seems like a major overcorrection in the opposite direction. It does seem likely that there are at least a few very old Indo-European loans in Uralic, so a huge time difference between them seems unlikely.
a lot of the commonalities that seem obvious when comparing Uralic to later IE languages actually look less likely when you instead compare them to the PIE words, when, if it's a true family relation it ought to be the opposite. For instance, "nime" does look like "name"... but less like "hnomn". Likewise, "wete" does look like "water", but rather less like "wodr"...
Kind of, but these might at least somewhat plausibly be explained as a result of PIE ablaut:
Wikipedia wrote:Proto-Uralic *weti- (or *wete-) : Proto-Indo-European *wodr̥, oblique stem *wedn-, both meaning 'water', and Proto-Uralic *nimi- (or *nime-) : Proto-Indo-European *h₁nōmn̥, both meaning 'name'. [...] Proto-Uralic *nimi- has been explained according to sound laws governing substitutions in borrowings (Koivulehto 1999), on the assumption that the original was a zero-grade oblique stem PIE *(H)nmen- as attested in later Balto-Slavic *inmen- and Proto-Celtic *anmen-. Proto-Uralic *weti- could be a loan from the PIE oblique e-grade form for 'water' or from an indirectly attested cognate root noun *wed-.

Pabappa wrote: 10 Oct 2021 02:51nimi~ name might be a coincidence after all .... remember that the -m doesnt count because its not part of the root.
I don't see why that would necessarily follow. It does make the case for the loan etymology a bit weaker, perhaps, but it's also perfectly plausible for a borrowing to include elements of a derivational suffix in the source language, reanalyzed as part of the stem in the target.
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Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences

Post by Shemtov »

:vie: <Pháp> "France" :eng: <Fap>
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Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences

Post by Pabappa »

Shemtov wrote: 20 Oct 2021 00:39 :vie: <Pháp> "France" :eng: <Fap>
okay thanks, now i DEFINITELY want to see a Polandball cartoon or something along this line .... i thought Māori calling them wīwī was the only one funny one, but now i know this.
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Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences

Post by Shemtov »

Pabappa wrote: 20 Oct 2021 01:11
Shemtov wrote: 20 Oct 2021 00:39 :vie: <Pháp> "France" :eng: <Fap>
okay thanks, now i DEFINITELY want to see a Polandball cartoon or something along this line .... i thought Māori calling them wīwī was the only one funny one, but now i know this.
Also, Hakka Chinese also calls them fap, and Yue and Gan both use something like /fat/. Also, the :isr: /t͡safʀat/ resembles the :isr: word for Frog: /t͡safaʀdeʔa/. They just can't catch a break.
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Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences

Post by Vlürch »

I just found out about this Aramaic word, not necessarily a "proper" false friend since there's no way they'd ever be mixed up, but still interesting because of the oppositeness:

Aramaic קרישתא /qæriʃtaʔ/ - cold, frozen
Finnish käristä! /kæristæ(ʔ)/ - roast!, burn! [food; imperative]

The Finnish thing could maybe also end in a glottal stop, I guess, since it's imperative. Dunno tbh, there's some kind of emphasis at the ends of imperatives aside from "secondary primary" stress, which I think is a glottal stop (or some kind of glottal thing?) if nothing follows it or the word after it begins with a vowel, but otherwise just gemination of the following consonant.



On the Indo-European and Uralic thing, I don't think it'd be at all weird if Proto-Uralic replaced some core vocabulary with Indo-European loanwords for no clear reason. I mean, Proto-Finnic did it and then Finnish did it even more... pretty sure Hungarian did some of that, too, not sure about Estonian but I'd assume so. Seems like Uralic languages have always been eager to absorb influences from Indo-European languages.🤔

...or I mean, it's weird but I wouldn't be surprised.

(Also, I woke up at 2AM so if there are typos or nothing makes sense, sorry. Just wanted to post the false friend, and saw the discussion about Indo-European and Uralic. Hopefully this time me replying to an etymological discussion doesn't turn it into a flamewar like every time...)
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Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences

Post by k1234567890y »

Gutnish päiku "girl" v.s. Swedish pojke "boy"

Not sure if they are cognates though

Also

Gutnish sårken "boy" v.s. Manchu sargan "woman, wife"
I prefer to not be referred to with masculine pronouns and nouns such as “he/him/his”.
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Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences

Post by Xonen »

k1234567890y wrote: 20 Nov 2021 19:00 Gutnish päiku "girl" v.s. Swedish pojke "boy"

Not sure if they are cognates though
Seems like päiku would more likely be a cognate of Swedish piga 'maid', from Old Norse píka (but I don't know for sure). It's apparently possible both of these are originally loans from Finnish (or Finnic); Finnish likewise has the similar-looking pair piika 'maid', 'servant girl' vs. poika 'boy'.
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Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences

Post by WeepingElf »

:swe: böjningsmönster 'inflectional paradigm'
:deu: Beugungsmuster 'diffraction pattern'

The fun fact is that both are built from perfectly cognate words.
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Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences

Post by Aevas »

WeepingElf wrote: 28 Nov 2021 16:17 :swe: böjningsmönster 'inflectional paradigm'
:deu: Beugungsmuster 'diffraction pattern'

The fun fact is that both are built from perfectly cognate words.
A quick google search suggests to me that both words can be used in both senses in both languages?
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Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences

Post by WeepingElf »

Aevas wrote: 28 Nov 2021 17:37
WeepingElf wrote: 28 Nov 2021 16:17 :swe: böjningsmönster 'inflectional paradigm'
:deu: Beugungsmuster 'diffraction pattern'

The fun fact is that both are built from perfectly cognate words.
A quick google search suggests to me that both words can be used in both senses in both languages?
I can't speak for Swedish, but the German word indeed can, though it is not very common (anymore) to call an inflectional paradigm a Beugungsmuster.
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Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences

Post by k1234567890y »

Japanese [o̞ɾe̞] "I, me(masculine)" v.s. Guarani ore /oˈɾe/ "we(exclusive), our"
I prefer to not be referred to with masculine pronouns and nouns such as “he/him/his”.
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Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences

Post by Iyionaku »

Some more I recently tripped over:

:eng: pointed
:deu: gepunktet "dotted, punctate"

:deu: genial "ingenious, brilliant"
:esp: genial "ingenious, brilliant"; but way more often it seems to be "awesome, great"

The common European (Latin originate) prefix sub-, meaning "down"
:esp: subir "to go up, climb up"
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Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences

Post by k1234567890y »

Japanese / koi "romantic love" v.s. Finnish koi "cancer"
I prefer to not be referred to with masculine pronouns and nouns such as “he/him/his”.
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Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences

Post by k1234567890y »

sorry for double posting, but I just found this:

In Aramaic, the root ש־כ־ח (sh-k-h) means “to find”; while in Hebrew, the same root ש־כ־ח (sh-k-h) means “to fotget”.
I prefer to not be referred to with masculine pronouns and nouns such as “he/him/his”.
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Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences

Post by Iyionaku »

Not sure if these are covered yet:

:cat: esports "sports" and :eng: E-Sports

:eng: handaxe and :deu: Handaxt (a small axe to be held in one hand)
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Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences

Post by Salmoneus »

Iyionaku wrote: 28 Dec 2022 09:16
:eng: handaxe and :deu: Handaxt (a small axe to be held in one hand)
If they mean the same thing, what's the misfortune?
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