But they're not cognates? I'm a mega-lumper who sees cognates where there are none all day long and even I have no trouble accepting that they're just coincidences, although I would say that my certifiably pseudoscientific theory that languages can sometimes inexplicably coalesce into similar directions might apply... but that's an extension of pseudolinguistic language comparison past the point where pseudoscientific language comparison reaches its peak and becomes impossible to argue in good faith, so yeah, even though it's what I believe is possible through some kind of universal sound symbolism or whatever, there's no evidence to support it.yangfiretiger121 wrote: ↑13 Dec 2019 22:13Technically, labeling that page "false cognates" is misleading because it doesn't provide etymological information for most entries, sticking to solely definitions. Specifically, boya and tsumari may be back-translations. Also, the page labels them as cognates. Thus, this is the incorrect topic. Granted, I wouldn't post the link in Surprising Cognates without complete research.k1234567890y wrote: ↑09 Dec 2019 08:50 just found a list of false cognates between Japanese and several other languages:
https://www.wa-pedia.com/language/japan ... ords.shtml
Anyway, the page doesn't label them as cognates like you say it does. It says they're "purely fortuitous coincidences between languages that have no phylogenetic connection nor history of borrowing", which doesn't sound like "they're cognates" to me... for some reason the link does have the word "cognate" in it, though, yeah, but I'd assume that's just to make it higher in search results or something like that.
You can look their etymologies up on Wiktionary, for example. All of them clearly have etymologies that make much more sense than cognacy with the similar non-Japanese words listed on that page. Not trying to sound like an asshole or anything, but like...