Re: False friends and other unfortunate coincidences
Posted: 27 Dec 2019 06:16
This Semitic pairing really got me: ማር /mar/ "Honey" /mar/ "Bitter"
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I think this sort of thing happens more often than might be expected with Indo-European interrogatives, demonstratives, prepositions and the like. The daughter languages innovated a bunch of different meanings for only-very-slightly-different forms (often case forms or gender forms) of particles that already had very little actual material in them. Once you mess around with sound changes, the forms are so close that you can often get them swapping places and the like.
Italian also seems to have zoccolo as its cognate.Dormouse559 wrote: ↑15 Apr 2020 01:11Hmm, zueco pretty clearly comes from Latin soccus, so I wonder why the initial consonant fronted.
It's just an example of historical confusion among Old Spanish sibilants across points of articulation. Although the general pattern truly was /s/ > /s z/, /k(i,e,ɛ) kj tj dz/ > /ts dz/, there's quite a number of cases where ancient /s/ ends up as /ts dz/, for example:Dormouse559 wrote: ↑15 Apr 2020 01:11Hmm, zueco pretty clearly comes from Latin soccus, so I wonder why the initial consonant fronted.
This is definitely a false friend, what leads you to say it isn't? False friends don't have to be historical cognates... Notice the example of Mandarin 书 shū 'book' and English shoe in the first post of the thread.
To me, the notion of a false friend has always entailed a potential risk of confusion between the two. To me that has always been the entire point of the term, and 'a specific type of literature' and 'tomorrow' aren't exacly concepts that you would risk confusing, unlike (since you mentioned it) shoe and book, which are both nouns denoting everyday objects.
FWIW, the English for this is "patten". [it applies both to the shoes themselves, and to removable wooden under-soles that you can put over other shoes]
Also cognates. Maybe, kinda (the vowel correspondences are weird, but the Finnic /s/ here does come from earlier */t/).Aszev wrote: ↑28 Apr 2020 22:01 A false friend that has been causing me some trouble:
In (written) Finnish, the 123 singular pronouns start with m~s~h. In the related North Sami, they start with m~d~s, and this change of the initial s- is really throwing me off.
Cf. Finnish s(in)ä, s(in)ut 'you-NOM, you-ACK' with North Sami son, su '(s)he, him/her'.