Today I Learned (TIL)

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TIL about False cognates, pairs of words [with] similar sounds and meaning, but different etymologies; "For example, the English word dog and the Mbabaram word dog" (en.m.wikipedia.org)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by otter@lemmy.ca to c/til@lemmy.ca

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There is a table of examples in the link. Some I saw include:

Desert

desert Latin dēserō ("to abandon") << ultimately PIE **seh₁- ("to sow")
Ancient Egyptian: Deshret (refers to the land not flooded by the Nile) from dšr (red)

Shark

shark Middle English shark from uncertain origin
Chinese 鲨 (shā) Named as its crude skin similar to sand (沙 (shā))

Kayak

Inuktitut ᖃᔭᖅ (kayak) Proto-Eskimo *qyaq
Turkish kayık ('small boat')[17] Old Turkic kayguk << Proto-Turkic kay- ("to slide, to turn")

A lot of these could be TIL posts of their own.

I also wonder if some of these are actually false cognates, or if there is a much earlier common origin with false associations that came afterwards

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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Sorry! I have a tendency to shift to technical vocab midtext, so it's likely my fault.

I'll use the comment to clarify some terms:

Proto-Germanic: the ancestor of English, German, Icelandic, Gothic, etc. Spoken from 500 BCE to 200 CE.
Proto-Celtic: the ancestor of Irish, Welsh, Gaulish, etc. Spoken from 1300 BCE to 800 BCE.
Proto-Italic: the ancestor of Latin, Umbrian, Faliscan etc. Spoken around 1000 BCE. (Since it's Latin's ancestor it's also the ancestor of every Romance language, kind of like their grandmother.)
Sanskrit: one of "the big five" languages of the Old World, spoken in Indian subcontinent. Attested as early as 1500 BCE. Not quite Hindi's ancestor, but close enough.
Proto-Indo-European: ancestor of all languages that I mentioned above. And a lot more.
If it's written ⟨like this⟩, I'm referring to the spelling. If it's written /laɪk ðɪs/, I'm referring to the phonemes (basic units of the spoken language). The symbols used are IPA, for a full list check this. For example /t͡ʃ/ is as in ⟨chill⟩, /θ/ is as in ⟨think⟩, /kʷ/ is as in ⟨queen⟩ but Latin handles it as a single unit, etc.
Cognate: a word with a true common origin. Basically they used to be the same word but time happened and each language got its own version of the word.
Affix - something that you plop into a word to make a new word. For example the un- and the -ing in ⟨undoing⟩ are two affixes.
Trennbare verb - I wrote it half asleep and couldn't remember the English term for this sort of verb. It's "phrasal verb" (a verb where the preposition is part of the verb). Gonna fix it. Latin used something similar, but instead of letting the preposition roam free as in English/German it glued the preposition to the word, the de- in ⟨desertum⟩ is an example of that.
feminine ending - in the case of Egyptian it's a suffix (-t) that appears in a few words, like that "dšrt". In this case it's mostly for grammatical purposes, and not plopping it makes you sound like "then who was phone?", but in Egyptian instead.

If anything else is unclear feel free to ask away!

[–] RamblingPanda@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 4 days ago

Danke 💕 I was half asleep reading it as well, that might not have helped.

I'm not really gifted, language wise, but I'm pretty interested. I love watching this one YouTuber of which which I forgot (Brit which seems to live in Germany, explaining things like the great vowel shift (aha, remembered! https://youtu.be/fmL6FClRC_s) and I'm fascinated by the similarities of old English and modern German. But I won't ever be able to keep things like those "For example /t͡ʃ/ is as in ⟨chill⟩, /θ/ is as in ⟨think⟩, /kʷ/ is as in ⟨queen⟩ but Latin handles it as a single unit, etc." in memory.

I understand it as I'm reading, but it'll be gone tomorrow. Washed away by some algorithm in trying to get working.

But thank you so much, it was a pleasure reading 💖