False cognates

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Prinsessa
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Re: False cognates

Post by Prinsessa »

GrandPiano wrote:
CMunk wrote:Well, on that iffy note:
:hun: igen (yes) ~ :dan: igen (again)
How about :dan: igen "again" and :eng: again?
Those are true cognates. :p
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CMunk
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Re: False cognates

Post by CMunk »

GrandPiano wrote:
CMunk wrote:Well, on that iffy note:
:hun: igen (yes) ~ :dan: igen (again)
How about :dan: igen "again" and :eng: again?
Wiktionary says they are cognates: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/again
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sangi39
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Re: False cognates

Post by sangi39 »

CMunk wrote:
GrandPiano wrote:
CMunk wrote:Well, on that iffy note:
:hun: igen (yes) ~ :dan: igen (again)
How about :dan: igen "again" and :eng: again?
Wiktionary says they are cognates: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/again
I was going to say the same thing [:P]

However, a little more looking into suggest that it's only the "gain" ~ "gen" elements that are cognates while English "a-" goes back to Proto-Germanic "ana" while the Danish "i-" goes back to PG "in".
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Re: False cognates

Post by GrandPiano »

Hm, OK…

How about:
:zho: 男 nán "male" - :eng: man
:zho: 人 rén "person" - :eng: children (the "ren" part)
:zho: 说/說 shuō "to speak, to say" - :eng: "say" (kind of iffy)
:zho: 我 "I, me" - :eng: "we"
:zho: 屁 "fart" - :eng: "pee" (also kind of iffy)
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Re: False cognates

Post by kanejam »

kahuna - :haw: :heb: 'priest'
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Re: False cognates

Post by shimobaatar »

kanejam wrote:kahuna - :haw: :heb: 'priest'
What is the Hebrew word for "priest"? Based on some limited prior knowledge, and the comparison to "kahuna", I'd guess it's related to the surname Cohen, but I'm not sure how far that's diverged from the word actually used in Hebrew.
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Re: False cognates

Post by Znex »

shimobaatar wrote:
kanejam wrote:kahuna - :haw: :heb: 'priest'
What is the Hebrew word for "priest"? Based on some limited prior knowledge, and the comparison to "kahuna", I'd guess it's related to the surname Cohen, but I'm not sure how far that's diverged from the word actually used in Hebrew.
Yeah, it's <כוהן> /ko'hen/.
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kanejam
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Re: False cognates

Post by kanejam »

Hmmm, according to Wiki there is a form of the word kohen which looks like kahuna.
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Re: False cognates

Post by Khemehekis »

clawgrip wrote:Not false cognates, just a weird coincidence, but where else am I going to post this

English "to" and "two" essentially translate to Japanese "ni" and "ni". It's just a weird coincidence that they are homonyms of each other in both languages.
Similar to this, in Scots English and some other varieties, there's I and aye (= yes) being pronounced the same way, which a Swedish girl I knew found very interesting when she lived in Scotland because in Swedish, jag (I) and ja (yes), can be pronounced the same way.

Which reminds me of another false cognate.

:gla: :eng: aye
:nzl: āe (yes, to agree, to give assent)
I just noticed something like this in Kankonian.

In Kankonian, the verb for "to complain" is nabel. With the agent noun suffix -fash, this becomes nabelfash, bellyacher. In German, Nabel means navel. So Nabel is belly-button and nabelfash is bellyacher.
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Re: False cognates

Post by GrandPiano »

Have Old Norse <mál> and Korean <말> mal been mentioned? I believe they both mean something along the lines of "langauge".
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Re: False cognates

Post by sangi39 »

GrandPiano wrote:Have Old Norse <mál> and Korean <말> mal been mentioned? I believe they both mean something along the lines of "langauge".
As a matter of fact, yes [:)]
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Re: False cognates

Post by Dezinaa »

English dual and Korean 둘 dul "two".
English two and Korean 두 du /tuː/ "two".

Not sure what the difference in meaning between 둘 and 두 is, though.
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Re: False cognates

Post by GrandPiano »

Dezinaa wrote:English dual and Korean 둘 dul "two".
English two and Korean 두 du /tuː/ "two".

Not sure what the difference in meaning between 둘 and 두 is, though.
According to Wikipedia, it's the same as the difference between the Mandarin words 二 and 两, which also both mean "two": 二 and 둘 are the bare numerals, while 两 and 두 are used in front of measure words. In Mandarin, you use 二 in compound numerals like 23 (二十三) regardless of whether there's a measure word after it, but I don't know if it's the same in Korean.

It seems that while Mandarin only does this with 2, Korean also does it with 1, 3, 4, and 20. Also, while the pre-measure-word forms of the Korean numerals are just formed by dropping the final consonant, the Mandarin words 二 and 两 have completely different pronounciations of èr and liǎng, respectively.
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Re: False cognates

Post by shimobaatar »

When I was younger, I had to take martial arts classes, and the specific style I was learning was from Korea. I remember we had to count to thirty in Korean while doing some kind of warm-up exercise, but even back then, when I knew nothing about Korean, I could tell that the pronunciations they gave us were highly Anglicized (and often quite mumbled). I've forgotten almost all of that now, but du~dul sounds familiar.

That has nothing to do with anything, really, but that's just what I was reminded of when Korean numbers were mentioned. I should really look up what the actual words are…
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Re: False cognates

Post by qwed117 »

shimobaatar wrote:When I was younger, I had to take martial arts classes, and the specific style I was learning was from Korea. I remember we had to count to thirty in Korean while doing some kind of warm-up exercise, but even back then, when I knew nothing about Korean, I could tell that the pronunciations they gave us were highly Anglicized (and often quite mumbled). I've forgotten almost all of that now, but du~dul sounds familiar.

That has nothing to do with anything, really, but that's just what I was reminded of when Korean numbers were mentioned. I should really look up what the actual words are…
That probably was Tae-Kwon-Do. I remember doing some of it a while ago when I was around 7 years. Now I forgot most of the stuff.
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Re: False cognates

Post by shimobaatar »

qwed117 wrote:
shimobaatar wrote:When I was younger, I had to take martial arts classes, and the specific style I was learning was from Korea. I remember we had to count to thirty in Korean while doing some kind of warm-up exercise, but even back then, when I knew nothing about Korean, I could tell that the pronunciations they gave us were highly Anglicized (and often quite mumbled). I've forgotten almost all of that now, but du~dul sounds familiar.

That has nothing to do with anything, really, but that's just what I was reminded of when Korean numbers were mentioned. I should really look up what the actual words are…
That probably was Tae-Kwon-Do. I remember doing some of it a while ago when I was around 7 years. Now I forgot most of the stuff.
Tang Soo Do, actually, but I'm sure the two styles aren't completely different from one another.
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Re: False cognates

Post by Shemtov »

kanejam wrote:Hmmm, according to Wiki there is a form of the word kohen which looks like kahuna.
It means "priesthood"
(Says a real Kohen)
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Re: False cognates

Post by CMunk »

CMunk wrote::jpn: -nai (negative morpheme) ~ :dan: nej (no)
:jpn: sou (as in "sou desu ne" = 'is that so?') ~ :eng: so

And in the following example, I am not quite sure of the second word's origin or spelling, but I think this is it.
:fra: papillon (butterfly) ~ nahuatl: papatl papalotl (butterfly)
Edit: Found the right word: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/papalotl
I edited this post to the right word. And more interestingly, it was borrowed into Spanish as :esp: papalote, which seems unrelated to the French :fra: papillon
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Re: False cognates

Post by Creyeditor »

Hebrew /(ʔ)aˈni/ and Mee/Ekari/Ekagi /a.ní/ both mean 1.SG
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Re: False cognates

Post by Squall »

What is a false cognate?
This list says that it has false cognates. I thought that false cognate is the eight item in the list below, but in this topic uses the definition of the fifth item.

1) Similar words, same origin, same meaning (origin, orīgine (Latin))
2) Similar words, same origin, different meaning (actual, actual(current in Spanish))
3) Different words, same origin, same meaning (beauty, bella (Latin))
4) Different words, same origin, different meaning (sure, sēcūrus(secure in Latin))
5) Similar words; different origin; same meaning (examples in this topic)
6) Similar words; different origin; different meaning (come, comer(eat in Portuguese))
7) Similar words; the origin does not matter; same meaning (includes 1 and 5)
8) Similar words; the origin does not matter; different meaning (includes 2 and 6)
English is not my native language. Sorry for any mistakes or lack of knowledge when I discuss this language.
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