False cognates

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Re: False cognates

Post by GrandPiano »

Does anyone know if Japanese 知る shiru "to know" is borrowed from Classical Chinese 知 "to know" (pronounced zhī in modern Mandarin)? If not, then those are false cognates.
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Re: False cognates

Post by qwed117 »

GrandPiano wrote:Does anyone know if Japanese 知る shiru "to know" is borrowed from Classical Chinese 知 "to know" (pronounced zhī in modern Mandarin)? If not, then those are false cognates.
Wiktionary states that it is kun'yomi, but the page for the Classical Chinese "cognate" seems to describe the Japanese word as a descendant, so, I don't know.
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Re: False cognates

Post by MrKrov »

It lists the pronunciation of the descendant as chi. It doesn't list it as being related to shiru.
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Re: False cognates

Post by GrandPiano »

This isn't a false cognate, but a weird coincidence I noticed:

:chn: 草 cǎo "grass" - 肏 cào "to fuck"
:jpn: 草 kusa "grass" - くそ kuso "shit; damn"

In both languages, the word for "grass" is phonetically very similar to another word with a more vulgar meaning.
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Re: False cognates

Post by GrandPiano »

:jpn: 骨 hone "bone" (pronounce bone with rendaku) - :eng: bone
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Re: False cognates

Post by Imralu »

:tan: Swahili: mwosha "washer", "person who washes"
:eng: English: washer

Mwosha comes from the verbal root -osha 'to wash' (which according to the Oxford Swahili dictionary is not from English) plus the singular human-class noun prefix m(w)-.

:tan: Swahili: tumbo "stomach"
:eng: English: tummy, tum, tumtum, tumbo (I know tumbo is not really established, but I've heard it and used it ... rumbos in my tumbo ... Australians are weird)

And I can't find any evidence that this is a loan:

:tan: Swahili: titi "breast, boob, tit(ty)"
:eng: English: titty
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Re: False cognates

Post by All4Ɇn »

:deu: auseinander "apart/asunder"
:eng: asunder
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Re: False cognates

Post by qwed117 »

:ind: Hindi कचरा kachra "trash" ~ "garbage"

To me they always were very similar. I can almost imagine it coming from a Portuguese, and English having a French doublet.
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Re: False cognates

Post by eldin raigmore »

I've probably mentioned this before.
:tan: Swahili: mbwa "dog"
:eng: Southron American English: mbwa "male dog" (vocative)
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Re: False cognates

Post by All4Ɇn »

eldin raigmore wrote::eng: Southron American English: mbwa "male dog" (vocative)
As a Southerner I can't say I've ever heard anything like this before. Is this an actual thing? Where have you heard it used before?
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Re: False cognates

Post by eldin raigmore »

All4Ɇn wrote:
eldin raigmore wrote: :eng: Southron American English: mbwa "male dog" (vocative)
As a Southerner I can't say I've ever heard anything like this before. Is this an actual thing? Where have you heard it used before?
In Houston Texas; IIANM among other places ranging over Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia, and two or three other Southron states.
It's derived from "boy".
Unless you're very young, or have never been to the country, I'll bet you've heard it.
You just didn't recognize it from the spelling.
Try to remember an elderly male relative or neighbor calling a dog (whose name he doesn't recall) by saying "C'mere, boy" with a bit thicker-than-usual local accent.
(Remember his speech doesn't have to be as precise as if he were trying to communicate with a human. And anyway the dog's ears have a Southron accent.)

Am I wrong?
Maybe it's just a Trans-Mississippi Confederacy thing; or even just a Texas thing; but I think not.


BTW where you from? I was raised in East Texas.
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Re: False cognates

Post by All4Ɇn »

eldin raigmore wrote:Try to remember an elderly male relative or neighbor calling a dog (whose name he doesn't recall) by saying "C'mere, boy" with a bit thicker-than-usual local accent.
This actually does kind of ring a bell. I feel like my grandfather might've said something like that although he was also from further west in the south
eldin raigmore wrote:BTW where you from? I was raised in East Texas.
I'm from the Florida-Georgia line
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Re: False cognates

Post by Imralu »

eldin raigmore wrote:
eldin raigmore wrote: :eng: Southron American English: mbwa "male dog" (vocative)
Try to remember an elderly male relative or neighbor calling a dog (whose name he doesn't recall) by saying "C'mere, boy" with a bit thicker-than-usual local accent.
I can totally understand the "bwa" ( In fact, the way I pronounce the /OI/ diphthong when my Australian accent is strong, it could very easily slip to [we]), but is there really a syllabic nasal before it, or even prenasalisation? In Swahili, the "m" is the stressed syllable in this word. I sometimes prenasalise a bit when I'm trying to really emphatically pronounce a voiced plosive, but I can't really imagine this with a Southern US accent ... but I guess whenever I try to run brain simulations, most of the material I've got to go from is Foghorn Leghorn ...
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Re: False cognates

Post by eldin raigmore »

Imralu wrote:
eldin raigmore wrote: :eng: Southron American English: mbwa "male dog" (vocative)

I can totally understand the "bwa" ...., but is there really a syllabic nasal before it, or even prenasalisation?

I intended pre-nasalization, which is what I think I remember I thought I heard.
At any rate I certainly didn't intend a syllabic [ m ].
Edit: There may be only a slight length difference between prenasalization of the [ b ] and a short unstressed syllabic [ m ].
Imralu wrote:In Swahili, the "m" is the stressed syllable in this word.
Really? It's syllabic? Like in <mbubwe> "lion"?
Maybe I was wrong; maybe some other African language has the prenasalized <mb>, and in Swahili word-initial <mb> the <m> is always syllabic.
Or at least it may be syllabic in <mbwa>.
If so, I was wrong, and these aren't really cognates, at least not orally and aurally.
Edit: It's very very rare for a consonantal syllable to be anything other than unstressed.
To put it another way, stressed consonantal syllables, let alone primarily-stressed consonantal syllables, are highly unusual.

Imralu wrote:I sometimes prenasalise a bit when I'm trying to really emphatically pronounce a voiced plosive, but I can't really imagine this with a Southern US accent ... but I guess whenever I try to run brain simulations, most of the material I've got to go from is Foghorn Leghorn ...
For purposes of dialectology, Texas is an entire country, and the South is an entire even-bigger-country containing it.
Foghorn Leghorn's accent is, IMO, an authentic Southron accent; not the only one, though.
I think in his 'lect it'd be [ bwa ] rather than [mbwa].
(Or maybe his pronunciation would be closer to Standard Average American "boy".)

If you remember, earlier in this thread, I admitted the possibility that this might be restricted to "the Trans-Mississippi Confederacy", that is, those Southron states west of the Mississippi.
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(As best as I can recall, that means Louisiana and Arkansas and Texas and Missouri. Oklahoma was "the Indian Territory" during the War, not a state; it probably counts anyway, since it's now part of "the sociological South". Kansas didn't secede; maybe it also counts anyway, but I don't think it likely, since most of the fighting was in the Confederacy's land. New Mexico also doesn't count, I think; if I recall correctly, they didn't need Federal troops' help to repel invaders from Texas.)
I also pointed out --- or, rather, suggested --- that a man speaking to a dog needn't be as precise in his articulation as when speaking to another human. He needs to be much clearer about tone-of-voice and gestures and so on, but not nearly as careful with articulation and co-articulation and so on (IMO).

tl;dr executive summary: You might be right, and I might be wrong.
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Re: False cognates

Post by Iyionaku »

Same example as in the false friends thread:

:mys: anda
:jpn: あなた anata

Both meaning "you"
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Re: False cognates

Post by DesEsseintes »

Manchu: bi- - to be
Evenki: bi- - to be
English: be

The Manchu and Evenki forms are cognates.
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Re: False cognates

Post by GrandPiano »

:jpn: 選ぶ erabu "to choose" - :eng: elect
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Re: False cognates

Post by Imralu »

eldin raigmore wrote:
Imralu wrote:
eldin raigmore wrote: :eng: Southron American English: mbwa "male dog" (vocative)

I can totally understand the "bwa" ...., but is there really a syllabic nasal before it, or even prenasalisation?

I intended pre-nasalization, which is what I think I remember I thought I heard.
At any rate I certainly didn't intend a syllabic [ m ].
Edit: There may be only a slight length difference between prenasalization of the [ b ] and a short unstressed syllabic [ m ].
Yeah, I don't think there's really a difference except length and possibly volume as well. Anyway, I wasn't fussy about which one. I just couldn't really imagine prenasalisation with what I think of as a "southern" accent.
eldin raigmore wrote:
Imralu wrote:In Swahili, the "m" is the stressed syllable in this word.
Really? It's syllabic? Like in <mbubwe> "lion"?
I've never seen that word before. The only word I know for "lion" is simba. In any case, if I came across the word mbubwe I would not be able to tell if the initial <m> is syllabic or not. Swahili is not, as is commonly said a completely "phonetic language" (ugh ... silly ways people describe things). Whether an <m> is syllabic depends on some things ...
eldin raigmore wrote:Maybe I was wrong; maybe some other African language has the prenasalized <mb>, and in Swahili word-initial <mb> the <m> is always syllabic.
Or at least it may be syllabic in <mbwa>.
The rules are, basically:

Swahili has prenasalised /mb nd ɲɟ ŋg mv nz/.

There are also a lot of syllabic <m> which derives from earlier earlier *mʊ, and appears as the nominal and adjectival marker in noun classes 1 and 3, in adjectival agreements with noun class 11 and, in modern Swahili, also class 14 (with a few idiomatic exceptions where it is /u/ instead, as it used to be ... class 11 and 14 have almost completely collapsed together). Syllabic /m̩/ also appears in the 2PL subject and 3SG object verbal prefixes. It also appears in words such as kuamka 'to wake up' and kuzungumza 'to talk'.

So, if a word begins with <mb> or <mv> you can't tell unless you know the noun class. The word mbaguzi 'bigot' is noun class one, derived from the verb kubagua 'to discriminate, divide up, segregate', so that <m> is syllabic: /m.ba.ˈgu.zi/. The word mbavu 'ribs' is class 10 (plural of class 11 ubavu), so that is simply prenasalisation: /ˈmba.vu/.

The class prefix of native Bantu words in classes 9 and 10 is prenasalisation. /l/ and /r/ merge with /d/ to become <nd> and /w/ merges with /b/ to become <mb> (although the only example of that I know is mbili 'two', from the stem -wili) ... words starting with other consonants that can't be prenasalised simply have no prefix in class 9 and 10.

Now, there is one rule that overrides these a little bit. I haven't seen it written anywhere, but it seems that no content word is allowed to be less than two syllables. It must have a stressable penultimate syllable. So although mbwa is a class 9/10 noun (albeit an animate one), that <m> actually receives the stress. In class 9 and 10, there are words such as nchi 'country', nge 'scorpion', mpya which begin with a stressed syllabic nasal, even where there would normally be no nasal, such as before <ch> or <p>.

So basically, if a noun or adjective is in danger of having only one syllable, you know the nasal is syllabic and stressed.
If there is an <m> before anything other than a <b> or a <p>, you know it's syllabic (and if it's the second last syllable, as in kuzungumza or kuamka, it is also stressed)
When there is <mb> or <mv>, knowing where the m comes from is important. If it's a verbal prefix, or the marker of noun classes 1 or 3, it's syllabic. If it's there because the word is in class 9 or 10, it's prenasalisation. If it's just something unanalysable inside a word, there is, I suppose, the chance that it could be syllabic before <b> or <v>, having come from an earlier *mʊ but I'm not sure if there actually any examples of this at all.

Then there are also a lot of loanwords in varying degrees of assimilation, which may not fit these rules.

An interesting unwritten minimal pair is:

ndege mbaya, which could either mean "bad bird" or "bad aeroplane(s)". Ndege is a class 9/10 noun, so that's NDE-ge. When the meaning is "bad aeroplanes", the adjective agrees in noun class, being 9 or 10 as well, so NDE-ge MBA-ya. When ndege means "bird", the adjective agrees with class 1, because it's animate, so then the <m> is syllabic: NDE-ge m-BA-ya.

Given than about 90% of the speakers of Swahili are non-native, I'm not going to worry too much about all of this, but I've got my head around it at least in theory anyway.

Anyway, if I came across the word mbubwe and knew that it meant "lion", I'd guess it'd be an animate 9/10 noun because that's where most animal nouns are, and because it's in no danger of being monosyllabic, the <m> wouldn't need to take the stress, so I'd assume it would simply be prenasalisation.
If so, I was wrong, and these aren't really cognates, at least not orally and aurally.
Edit: It's very very rare for a consonantal syllable to be anything other than unstressed.
To put it another way, stressed consonantal syllables, let alone primarily-stressed consonantal syllables, are highly unusual.
Well, no, they're clearly not cognates ... but I'd still count them as false cognates. It's still a lot closer than some of the things people put here, such as "erabu"/"elect".

And stressed nasal syllables are quite common in Swahili. One of the most common words is mtu "person", also used as an indefinite pronoun "someone" or "one". In some dialects (native or non-native, I think both?) it's pronounced like "mutu" and I've seen it written this way too. In languages to the west of Swahili's range (I can't remember which ... Kinyarwanda, Luganda?) it's muntu and you can actually see that Swahili has simply dropped the prenasalisation of voiceless sounds and collapsed *mʊ. The words Bantu and Ubuntu are from the same root in different languages and their direct Swahili cognates are watu ('people' ... often pronounced "batu" in the west of the Swahili range because of the languages there) and utu ('humanity').

tl;dr - maybe?
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Re: False cognates

Post by eldin raigmore »

Imralu wrote:tl;dr - maybe?
Not at all!
Contrariwise, I'm very grateful for the reply!
Surprised as heck about the stressed syllabic nasal consonants, or nasal consonantal stressed syllables, or however they should be termed.
(The southron "mbwa" definitely has the stress on the "a", not the "m".)
I appreciate you confirming that's what you really meant! (Natlangs are just plain weird, aren't they?)

While apparently "mbubwe" is a real word in some language,
the word that means "lion" is apparently "mbube".
(Though I'm not the only one to hear a /w/ in it.)
Edit: And the "m" is syllabic, or at least moraic; it gets its own note in the song.
And it is apparently in Zulu, not Swahili.
Last edited by eldin raigmore on 06 Aug 2017 15:29, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: False cognates

Post by GrandPiano »

:jpn: すくう sukuu "to scoop; to ladle out" - :eng: scoop
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