False cognates

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sangi39
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Re: False cognates

Post by sangi39 »

Xonen wrote: 16 Nov 2021 21:54
sangi39 wrote: 15 Nov 2021 22:09
Xonen wrote: 15 Nov 2021 20:47
ɶʙ ɞʛ wrote: 09 Nov 2021 05:13 Another unusual example:
English "Rat-a-tat" vs Finnish "Hra-ca-ca" (most prominently known in Ievan Polkka)

It's an ambiguous example though, as these words don't actually mean anything, they're normally just filler words used for metrical or rhyming purposes in poetic/musical context.
I'm not entirely sure what sound the <c> is supposed to stand for here, /ts/? In any case, these might actually be real... "cognates", in that it's probably not a coincidence that the nonsense syllables used in humming and scat singing tend to be broadly similar all across Western music.
Took me a second, because it's not part of the Korpiklaani version of the song, haha, but it's "ratsatsaa".
Yeah, well, that's more in line with normal Finnish orthography; <c> isn't really used at all, except in proper nouns, where it's usually pronounced /k/ or /s/ (as in English). Now, <c> is used in the Finno-Ugric transcription system for the affricate [ts], so I guess using it to transcribe Finnish scat singing at least... kind of makes sense? But then again, /ts/ is normally pronounced as a cluster in Finnish, not an affricate.
That was something that confused me about the lyrics in the booklet for Ajattara's album Äpäre. I'd have to did it out, but I'm sure it used <c> in place of <k> in almost all instances, possibly except where <k> came after another consonant (where it would remain <k>)? I'd only just started with Finnish (and as is always the case, never really learned much thanks to "oo, new language! Shiny!") but it was very "wait, what is this <c> here for?" [:P]


Xonen wrote: 16 Nov 2021 21:54
the bridge of the original, by Loituma
The bridge might well have been added by Loituma, but the original song is much older: the lyrics (or at least the first printed version of them) were published by Eino Kettunen in 1928, and the melody apparently goes back to at least the 18th century.
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Re: False cognates

Post by Xonen »

The tangent that grew out of the Ievan Polkka discussion has been split off into its own thread.
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Re: False cognates

Post by Sequor »

Saw someone post this elsewhere:

:rus: опасно opásno 'dangerous(ly)'
:nld: oppassen 'to watch out, beware'

Russian and Dutch being closely related confirmed. "Totally explains the flags."
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Re: False cognates

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Sequor wrote: 19 Nov 2021 01:17 Saw someone post this elsewhere:

:rus: опасно opásno 'dangerous(ly)'
:nld: oppassen 'to watch out, beware'

Russian and Dutch being closely related confirmed. "Totally explains the flags."
But seriously, I have once heard that Czar Peter the Great modelled the Russian flag on the Dutch one, just permuting the colours.
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Re: False cognates

Post by Sequor »

Arabic شاطئ‎ ʃaatˤiʔ 'beach'
Mandarin 沙灘 shātān 'beach'

Arabic عين ʕain 'eye'
Mandarin 眼 yǎn 'eye'

Arabic سرّح sarraħa 'to comb (one's hair)'
Mandarin 梳理 shūlǐ 'to comb (one's hair)'

Sanskrit sū́tram 'a rule of grammar or law; a sutra or discourse of the Buddha'
Arabic سورة sūra 'a surah or chapter of the Qur'an'
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Re: False cognates

Post by Shemtov »

Proto-Mongolic *köl "Foot"
Proto-Dravidian *kāl(u) "id."
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Re: False cognates

Post by Xonen »

:lva: bet
:eng: but

I've spent the last dozen years or so under the impression that these were true cognates; I guess I just sort of assumed that, since Latvian has a whole bunch of Low German loanwords anyway, this must be one of them as well. But today, I went to Low German class and found out the word for 'but' is man, and at least the teacher had never heard of anything resembling bet.

According to Wiktionary, the Latvian word is actually:
From Proto-Baltic *bet, from Proto-Indo-European *be, *bʰe (“outside, without”) (whence also Latvian preposition bez, q.v.), to which an old particle -t was added, visible also in the Latvian particle it and the adverb šeit (“here”) (q.v.). Cognates include Lithuanian bèt, Sudovian bat.[1]
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Re: False cognates

Post by Salmoneus »

Xonen wrote: 26 Jan 2022 23:20 :lva: bet
:eng: but

I've spent the last dozen years or so under the impression that these were true cognates; I guess I just sort of assumed that, since Latvian has a whole bunch of Low German loanwords anyway, this must be one of them as well. But today, I went to Low German class and found out the word for 'but' is man, and at least the teacher had never heard of anything resembling bet.

According to Wiktionary, the Latvian word is actually:
From Proto-Baltic *bet, from Proto-Indo-European *be, *bʰe (“outside, without”) (whence also Latvian preposition bez, q.v.), to which an old particle -t was added, visible also in the Latvian particle it and the adverb šeit (“here”) (q.v.). Cognates include Lithuanian bèt, Sudovian bat.[1]
So it's at least half cognate, then?

["but" is an abbreviated form of "by out", where "by" is cognate to the be- part of the Latvian word. The 't' bits don't seem to match, though; Wiktionary (on the Lithuanian cognate) blames that on a form of 'toh1', which would make the Latvian cognate to "by the"]
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Re: False cognates

Post by Xonen »

Salmoneus wrote: 27 Jan 2022 23:18
Xonen wrote: 26 Jan 2022 23:20 :lva: bet
:eng: but

I've spent the last dozen years or so under the impression that these were true cognates; I guess I just sort of assumed that, since Latvian has a whole bunch of Low German loanwords anyway, this must be one of them as well. But today, I went to Low German class and found out the word for 'but' is man, and at least the teacher had never heard of anything resembling bet.

According to Wiktionary, the Latvian word is actually:
From Proto-Baltic *bet, from Proto-Indo-European *be, *bʰe (“outside, without”) (whence also Latvian preposition bez, q.v.), to which an old particle -t was added, visible also in the Latvian particle it and the adverb šeit (“here”) (q.v.). Cognates include Lithuanian bèt, Sudovian bat.[1]
So it's at least half cognate, then?

["but" is an abbreviated form of "by out", where "by" is cognate to the be- part of the Latvian word. The 't' bits don't seem to match, though; Wiktionary (on the Lithuanian cognate) blames that on a form of 'toh1', which would make the Latvian cognate to "by the"]
...huh. Hadn't even occurred to me to check, but right you are. Just much more distant cognates than I thought, then, and with a similar development (including the semantic drift) occurring independently in both. Interesting.
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Re: False cognates

Post by Salmoneus »

So, this doesn't really fit the topic, but it sort of does.

Wiktionary (which is pretty brilliant on this topic) lists 22 light u-stems in Proto-Germanic. (that is: nouns ending -uz or -u, with a short vowel in an open syllable in the root).

Of those 22... four, nearly 20%, are words for pointy sticks (posts, spikes, spears, etc)! And all four begin with sC-clusters. [from the other direction: 4 out of 12 u-stems with initial sC clusters are words for pointy sticks!] This seems way too much to be a coincidence! But it also doesn't seem obvious how they could all be related.

[and another of the 22 is also a word for sticks]

spaluz could conceivably be related to staluz. But spituz and speru seem harder to fit in.

Beyond the u-stems, there's also spitan and spito (presumably just reanalysed variants), and likewise steluz, stelô and stalô, as well as sperru and sparru. While spiro is theoretically unrelated. But there's also stakaz, and stalukaz (that one's probably a derivationg of staluz), and speutan, and stauraz, and skaftaz, and then over with the meaning 'splinter' (smaller pointy stick) there's speldan, and splinton and spelk and spilaz, none of which are allegedly related. So in various parts of England today, a splinter can be called a 'splinter', a 'spilk', a 'speld', a 'spill' or 'spile', or a 'spale', all of which are theoretically unrelated in etymology, but they really don't look it!

These all seem too similar to be coincidence, but also a bit too varied to fall under the usual sound-symbolism thing.

Actually, here's a good crosslinguistic one:
English: spit, a skewer for food
Norwegian: spyd, a skewer for food

Not related! Theoretically!

And more solidly in English: spale (strengthening cross-timber, or lathe) and pale (wooden post, or cheese scoop). Unrelated - one is from Germanic 'spaluz', while the other is from Latin 'palus', with more or less the same meaning as one another.
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Re: False cognates

Post by Dormouse559 »

In the vein of arbor:

:eng: scissors
:lat: scissor

The English word comes from Late Latin cisoria/cisorium via French, but it was respelled to resemble scissor. That explains the incongruous <ss> /z/ sound correspondence.
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Re: False cognates

Post by k1234567890y »

Salmoneus wrote: 14 Feb 2022 23:06 Of those 22... four, nearly 20%, are words for pointy sticks (posts, spikes, spears, etc)! And all four begin with sC-clusters. [from the other direction: 4 out of 12 u-stems with initial sC clusters are words for pointy sticks!] This seems way too much to be a coincidence! But it also doesn't seem obvious how they could all be related.
well, maybe through some forms of "phono-semantic matching" or "sound symbolism" i.e. maybe among early Germanic speakers(or maybe earlier: pre-Germanic speakers or even early Indo-European speakers), nouns beginning with sC-clusters and with an u-stem ending tend to be associated with "pointiness", and words with both of that phonological shape and the meaning related to "pointiness" tend to survive through such associations.

Another possibility is the sC start could be a relic from a lost root starting with /s/ meaning something like "pointy": seC1 "pointy" + C2e... > sC1C2e... > sC2C2e... > sC2e...

remark: the Proto-Indo-European *sek- (“to cut”) could be a a candidate for the origin of the initial /s/ in the initial sC clusters with such meanings.

But this can just be me.
I prefer to not be referred to with masculine pronouns and nouns such as “he/him/his”.
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Re: False cognates

Post by k1234567890y »

Ancient Egyptian dšrt (deshret) "Red One" v.s. English desert

Remark: Deshret is an Ancient Egyptian word used to indicate the desert area outside of "kemet", the fertile Nile river basin
I prefer to not be referred to with masculine pronouns and nouns such as “he/him/his”.
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Re: False cognates

Post by Lorik »

Not sure if this has already been posted, but:
:rus: сон [son] 'dream', 'sleep'
:bra: sono [ˈsonʊ] 'sleep' and sonho [ˈsoj̃ʊ] 'dream'
Native: :bra: | Fluent: :eng: :fra: | Intermediate: :rus:
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Re: False cognates

Post by WeepingElf »

Lorik wrote: 23 May 2022 12:59 Not sure if this has already been posted, but:
:rus: сон [son] 'dream', 'sleep'
:bra: sono [ˈsonʊ] 'sleep' and sonho [ˈsoj̃ʊ] 'dream'
Are you sure that these aren't true cognates? They could be both from PIE *swopnos, but I don't know.
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Re: False cognates

Post by Lorik »

WeepingElf wrote: Are you sure that these aren't true cognates? They could be both from PIE *swopnos, but I don't know.
I'd checked Wiktionary before posting and сон comes from *supnós, sono from *swépnos, and sonho from *swópniom. However, I've taken a deeper look now and it seems all of these PIE words come from the same root *swep-, so at the end of the day, I guess they are true cognates after all.
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Re: False cognates

Post by Khemehekis »

Lorik wrote: 23 May 2022 17:18
WeepingElf wrote: Are you sure that these aren't true cognates? They could be both from PIE *swopnos, but I don't know.
I'd checked Wiktionary before posting and сон comes from *supnós, sono from *swépnos, and sonho from *swópniom. However, I've taken a deeper look now and it seems all of these PIE words come from the same root *swep-, so at the end of the day, I guess they are true cognates after all.
False cognate:
:eng: sleep
PIE *swep-
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Re: False cognates

Post by Sequor »

Arabic شعر ʃiʕr 'poetry, poem'
Hebrew שִׁיר shir 'song, poem'
Chinese shī 'poetry, poem'
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Re: False cognates

Post by Sequor »

Sanskrit नाग nāga- 'snake, naga', Proto-Germanic *snakô 'snake; worm'
Hebrew נָחָשׁ nakhásh 'snake'
Proto-Bantu *nyókà 'snake', Swahili nyoka 'snake', Zulu inyoka 'snake'

Middle Chinese 腳 [kɨɐk̚ ] 'foot', Cantonese goek3 [kœːk̚˧]
Chechen ког '(animal) foot, paw', Ingush ког '(animal) foot, paw', Komi-Zyrian кок 'foot'
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Re: False cognates

Post by Iyionaku »

:srb: :hrv: Serbo-Croatian kaput "coat", :deu: German Kapuze "coat", vs. :hun: Hungarian kabát "coat"

The Serbo-Croatian word is, easily identifiably, a loan word which ultimately derives from Latin caput "head". Same with the German one. However, the Hungarian word, albeit meaning exactly the same and closely resembling the phonetics of the German and Serbo-Croatian words, is actually not! It is indeed a loan word from an Indo-European language, but from Persian قبا qabā "coat". Qabā and caput do not derive from the same PIE root either.
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