False cognates are pairs of words that seem to be cognates because of similar sounds and meaning, but have different etymologies; they can be within the same language or from different languages, even within the same family. [1] For example, the English word dog and the Mbabaram word dog have exactly the same meaning and very similar pronunciations, but by complete coincidence. Likewise, English much and Spanish mucho came by their similar meanings via completely different Proto-Indo-European roots, and same for English have and Spanish haber . This is different from false friends, which are similar-sounding words with different meanings, and may or may not be cognates.
Even though false cognates lack a common root, there may still be an indirect connection between them (for example by phono-semantic matching or folk etymology).
The term "false cognate" is sometimes misused to refer to false friends, but the two phenomena are distinct. [1] [2] False friends occur when two words in different languages or dialects look similar, but have different meanings. While some false friends are also false cognates, many are genuine cognates (see False friends § Causes). [2] For example, English pretend and French prétendre are false friends, but not false cognates, as they have the same origin. [3]
The basic kinship terms mama and papa comprise a special case of false cognates; many languages share words of similar form and meaning for these kinship terms, but due to common processes of language acquisition rather than relatedness of the languages. [4] [5] [6] [7]
Note: Some etymologies may be simplified to avoid overly long descriptions.
Term 1 | Etymology 1 | Term 2 | Etymology 2 |
---|---|---|---|
day | OE dæġ << PGmc *dagaz << PIE *dʰeǵʰ- [8] | diary | Latin diārium << dies ("day") << Proto-Italic *djēm << PIE *dyḗws ("heaven") [9] [10] |
island | OE īġland << PGmc *awjōlandą or ea + land | isle | Latin insula |
English term | English etymology | Foreign term | Foreign etymology |
---|---|---|---|
bad | Possibly from OE bæddel ("hermaphrodite, effeminate man") << PGmc *bad- ("defile") | Persian بد, bad [11] [10] | Middle Iranian *vat << PIE *wed(h)- |
better | OE betera | Persian بهتر, behtar and Hindustani descendants | |
cinder | OE sinder << PGmc *sendra- "slag" << PIE *sendhro- "coagulating fluid" | French cendre ("ash") | Latin cinerem << PIE *ken- ("to arise, begin") |
dog | OE docga or dogga | Mbabaram dog ("dog") [10] | Proto-Pama-Nyungan *gudaga |
day | OE dæġ << PGmc *dagaz << PIE *dʰeǵʰ- [8] | Latin dies ("day") and descendants [9] [10] | Proto-Italic *djēm << PIE *dyḗws ("heaven") [9] [10] |
hollow | OE holh << PGmc *holhwo- | Lake Miwok hóllu [11] | |
much | OE myċel << PGmc *mikilaz << PIE *meǵa- ("big, stout, great") | Spanish mucho ("much") [10] | Latin multus (many) << PIE *ml̥tos ("crumbled") |
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) |
saint | Latin sanctus << PIE *seh₂k- ("to sanctify") via French | Sanskrit sant and descendants [12] | sat ("truth, reality, essence") |
shark | Middle English shark from uncertain origin | Chinese 鲨 (shā) | Named as its crude skin similar to sand (沙 (shā)) |
have | Middle English haven << OE habban (“to have”) << Proto-West Germanic *habbjan << Proto-Germanic *habjaną (“to have”), durative of *habjaną (“to lift, take up”) << PIE *kh₂pyéti present tense of *keh₂p- (“to take, seize, catch”). | Corsican avè (“to have”) | Latin habēre, present active infinitive of habeō << Proto-Italic *habēō << PIE *gʰeh₁bʰ- (“to grab”). |
Term 1 | Etymology 1 | Term 2 | Etymology 2 |
---|---|---|---|
French feu ("fire") | Latin focus | German Feuer ("fire") | PGmc *fōr ~ *fun- [8] [13] [10] << PIE *péh₂wr̥ |
French nuque ('nape') | Latin nucha, from Arabic نُخَاع nukhāʻ 'spinal marrow' | Hungarian nyak ('neck') [14] | Proto-Uralic *ńᴕkkɜ 'neck' |
German haben ('to have') | PG *habjaną << PIE *keh₂p- ("to grasp") | Latin habere ("to have") and descendants [15] | PIE *gʰeh₁bʰ- ("to grab, to take") |
Swedish göl ("pool") | PG *guljō | Salar göl ("pool") | Proto-Turkic *kȫl ("lake") |
German Erdbeere ('strawberry') | Erd ('earth') + Beere ('berry') | Hungarian epér ('strawberry') [14] | |
German Haus ('house') | Hungarian ház ('house') [14] | ||
Hawaiian kahuna ('priest') | Hebrew כוהן (kohen) ('priest') [16] | ||
Hungarian nő ('woman') | Mandarin Chinese 女 (nü̆) ('woman') [14] | ||
Inuktitut ᖃᔭᖅ ( kayak ) | Proto-Eskimo *qyaq | Turkish kayık ('small boat') [17] | Old Turkic kayguk << Proto-Turkic kay- ("to slide, to turn") |
Mayaimi Mayaimi (Big water) | Hebrew מים mayim ("water") | ||
Japanese ありがとう arigatō ("thank you") | Clipping of 有難う御座います "arigatō gozaimasu" ("(I) am thankful") << 有難く "arigataku" << 有難い "arigatai" ("thankful, appreciated") << Old Japanese 有難斯 "arigatasi" ("difficult to be") [ citation needed ] | Portuguese obrigado ("thank you") [18] | Literally "obliged" << Latin obligātus |
Hindustani अम्मा / اما (ammā, "mother") | Prakrit 𑀅𑀁𑀫𑀸 (aṃmā), from Sanskrit अम्बा (ambā, "mother, feminine honorific") | Tamil அம்மா (ammā, "mother") | Proto-Dravidian *amma ("mother") |
Indonesian tanah ("ground") | Proto-Austronesian *tanaq | Aleut tanax̂ ("ground") | Proto-Eskimo *luna ("earth") |
Spanish gansa ("female goose") | Gothic *𐌲𐌰𐌽𐍃 | Tagalog gansa ("goose") | Malay angsa [19] [20] |
Tagalog bagay ("thing") | Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *bagay | Haitian Creole bagay ("thing") | Saint Dominican Creole French bagage |
Dusun do ("of") | Austronesian o | Portuguese do ("of") | Latin de |
The coincidental similarity between false cognates can sometimes be used in the creation of new words (neologization). For example, the Hebrew word דַּלdal ("poor") (which is a false cognate of the phono-semantically similar English word dull) is used in the new Israeli Hebrew expression אין רגע דל en rega dal (literally "There is no poor moment") as a phono-semantic matching for the English expression Never a dull moment. [21]
Similarly, the Hebrew word דיבוב dibúv ("speech, inducing someone to speak"), which is a false cognate of (and thus etymologically unrelated to) the phono-semantically similar English word dubbing, is then used in the Israeli phono-semantic matching for dubbing. The result is that in Modern Hebrew, דיבוב dibúv means "dubbing". [22]
In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language.
In linguistics, a false friend is a word in a different language that looks or sounds similar to a word in a given language, but differs significantly in meaning. Examples of false friends include English embarrassed and Spanish embarazado 'pregnant'; English parents versus Portuguese parentes and Italian parenti ; English demand and French demander 'ask'; and English gift, German Gift 'poison', and Norwegian gift, both 'married' and 'poison'.
A false etymology is a false theory about the origin or derivation of a specific word or phrase. When a false etymology becomes a popular belief in a cultural/linguistic community, it is a folk etymology. Nevertheless, folk/popular etymology may also refer to the process by which a word or phrase is changed because of a popular false etymology. To disambiguate the usage of the term "folk/popular etymology", Ghil'ad Zuckermann proposes a clear-cut distinction between the derivational-only popular etymology (DOPE) and the generative popular etymology (GPE): the DOPE refers to a popular false etymology involving no neologization, and the GPE refers to neologization generated by a popular false etymology.
A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge. In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word lexicon derives from Greek word λεξικόν, neuter of λεξικός meaning 'of or for words'.
Lexicology is the branch of linguistics that analyzes the lexicon of a specific language. A word is the smallest meaningful unit of a language that can stand on its own, and is made up of small components called morphemes and even smaller elements known as phonemes, or distinguishing sounds. Lexicology examines every feature of a word – including formation, spelling, origin, usage, and definition.
In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, “to calque” means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new word or phrase (lexeme) in the target language. For instance, the English word skyscraper has been calqued in dozens of other languages, combining words for "sky" and "scrape" in each language, as for example Wolkenkratzer in German, arranha-céu in Portuguese, grattacielo in Italian, gökdelen in Turkish, and matenrou(摩天楼) in Japanese.
A root is the core of a word that is irreducible into more meaningful elements. In morphology, a root is a morphologically simple unit which can be left bare or to which a prefix or a suffix can attach. The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word, and of a word family, which carries aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. Content words in nearly all languages contain, and may consist only of, root morphemes. However, sometimes the term "root" is also used to describe the word without its inflectional endings, but with its lexical endings in place. For example, chatters has the inflectional root or lemma chatter, but the lexical root chat. Inflectional roots are often called stems. A root, or a root morpheme, in the stricter sense, may be thought of as a monomorphemic stem.
Etymology is the study of the origin and evolution of words, including their constituent units of sound and meaning, across time. In the 21st century a subfield within linguistics, etymology has become a more rigorously scientific study. Most directly tied to historical linguistics, philology, and semiotics, it additionally draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, pragmatics, and phonetics in order to attempt a comprehensive and chronological catalogue of all meanings and changes that a word carries throughout its history. The origin of any particular word is also known as its etymology.
Folk etymology – also known as (generative) popular etymology, analogical reformation, (morphological)reanalysis and etymological reinterpretation – is a change in a word or phrase resulting from the replacement of an unfamiliar form by a more familiar one through popular usage. The form or the meaning of an archaic, foreign, or otherwise unfamiliar word is reinterpreted as resembling more familiar words or morphemes.
Phono-semantic matching (PSM) is the incorporation of a word into one language from another, often creating a neologism, where the word's non-native quality is hidden by replacing it with phonetically and semantically similar words or roots from the adopting language. Thus the approximate sound and meaning of the original expression in the source language are preserved, though the new expression in the target language may sound native.
In linguistics, mama and papa are considered a special case of false cognates. In many languages of the world, sequences of sounds similar to and mean "mother" and "father", usually but not always in that order. This is thought to be a coincidence resulting from the process of early language acquisition.
In linguistics, an internationalism or international word is a loanword that occurs in several languages with the same or at least similar meaning and etymology. These words exist in "several different languages as a result of simultaneous or successive borrowings from the ultimate source". Pronunciation and orthography are similar so that the word is understandable between the different languages.
The roots of verbs and most nouns in the Semitic languages are characterized as a sequence of consonants or "radicals". Such abstract consonantal roots are used in the formation of actual words by adding the vowels and non-root consonants which go with a particular morphological category around the root consonants, in an appropriate way, generally following specific patterns. It is a peculiarity of Semitic linguistics that a large majority of these consonantal roots are triliterals.
Semantic change is a form of language change regarding the evolution of word usage—usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from the original usage. In diachronic linguistics, semantic change is a change in one of the meanings of a word. Every word has a variety of senses and connotations, which can be added, removed, or altered over time, often to the extent that cognates across space and time have very different meanings. The study of semantic change can be seen as part of etymology, onomasiology, semasiology, and semantics.
A discourse marker is a word or a phrase that plays a role in managing the flow and structure of discourse. Since their main function is at the level of discourse rather than at the level of utterances or sentences, discourse markers are relatively syntax-independent and usually do not change the truth conditional meaning of the sentence. They can also indicate what a speaker is doing on a variety of different planes. Examples of discourse markers include the particles oh, well, now, then, you know, and I mean, and the discourse connectives so, because, and, but, and or. The term discourse marker was popularized by Deborah Schiffrin in her 1987 book Discourse Markers.
In linguistics and literature, periphrasis is the use of a larger number of words, with an implicit comparison to the possibility of using fewer. The comparison may be within a language or between languages. For example, "more happy" is periphrastic in comparison to "happier", and English "I will eat" is periphrastic in comparison to Spanish comeré.
A semantic loan is a process of borrowing semantic meaning from another language, very similar to the formation of calques. In this case, however, the complete word in the borrowing language already exists; the change is that its meaning is extended to include another meaning its existing translation has in the lending language. Calques, loanwords and semantic loans are often grouped roughly under the phrase "borrowing". Semantic loans often occur when two languages are in close contact, and they take various forms. The source and target word may be cognates, which may or may not share any contemporary meaning in common; they may be an existing loan translation or parallel construction ; or they may be unrelated words that share an existing meaning.
Homophonic translation renders a text in one language into a near-homophonic text in another language, usually with no attempt to preserve the original meaning of the text. For example, the English "sat on a wall" is rendered as French "s'étonne aux Halles". More generally, homophonic transformation renders a text into a near-homophonic text in the same or another language: e.g., "recognize speech" could become "wreck a nice beach".
Ghil'ad Zuckermann is an Israeli-born language revivalist and linguist who works in contact linguistics, lexicology and the study of language, culture and identity.
Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew is a scholarly book written in the English language by linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann, published in 2003 by Palgrave Macmillan. The book proposes a socio-philological framework for the analysis of "camouflaged borrowing" such as phono-semantic matching. It introduces for the first time a classification for "multisourced neologisms", new words that are based on two or more sources at the same time.
Thus conceptually as well as etymologically, it differs considerably from the false cognate 'saint' which is often used to translate it. Like 'saint', 'sant' has also taken on the more general ethical meaning of the 'good person' whose life is a spiritual and moral exemplar, and is therefore attached to a wide variety of gurus, 'holy men', and other religious teachers.