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Is this a false cognate? 1907AbsoluTurk ( talk) 12:48, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
These three words, which I've for a long time suspected of being cognates (they sound very similarly and all are military-related), apparently derive from three different sources ("march" is from PIE *mereg "edge, boundary", "marshal" is from PIE *markos "horse" (well that's what Wiktionary says), and "martial" is from the Latin god Mars<*Mavors, which almost certainly isn't from either of the above). Do you think that this triple (or at least part of it) is significant enough to be included in the article? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.141.164.64 ( talk) 21:34, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
The entry for מסתורין ("mistorin" - mystery) in the Hebrew Wiktionary reads roughly:
...
Etymology:
1. While the root of the word מסתורין is ס-ת-ר, it's source is the Greek word μυστηριον (Mystirion), which means a secret, secret rituals. Many other languages derive their "mystery" from the same source.
2. In the Talmud, the word is usually written, as transliterated Greek, with the letter teth (ט) as מסטורין, but also with tav, signaling its connection to the Hebrew root [My comment: The Hebrew root סתר is associated with, among other things, hiding and obscurity as in the words להסתיר (to hide) or נסתר (hidden, obscure)]
3. Other Hebrew words were also renovated based on the meaning of the Hebrew root and similarity in sound to a foreign word (גאון (gaon) - genious, מסכה (masekha) - mask and more)
...
I'm not a linguist myself, and I'm not sure what's the best thing to do here: on the one hand, the words are false cognates, in the sense that the meaning of the Hebrew word is derived from the Hebrew root which doesn't share a root (as far as I know) with the Greek word.
On the other hand, this is a much weaker form of false cognates, as the Greek word only resembled a previously nonexistent structure of the root סתר (s.t.r), and was essentially borrowed and fitted to look like a Hebrew word.
Any ideas? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.65.201.192 ( talk) 22:44, 13 November 2012 (UTC)
Estonian mina/Finnish minä (I), and Zulu mina (I); also in Turkish men/ben (I), in English me/my/mine ,etc. a Black African Aurignacian word??? (so NOT a false cognate!) Böri ( talk) 13:53, 4 March 2013 (UTC)
Both minä - men / ben and sinä - sen are resembles a lot. There are also minun - menim, sinun - senin, hän - an etc. -- 88.251.4.159 ( talk) 04:11, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
If I were to follow the reasoning of this revert strictly, I'd have to remove the entire list of examples because almost none are reliably sourced. However, per WP:PRESERVE, it would be wise to find a better place on another Wikimedia project to put these false cognates. In this archived section, I suggested making it a Wiktionary appendix, but it never got anywhere. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Damian Yerrick ( talk • contribs)
Some words came from the Ice Age. Böri ( talk) 11:32, 2 November 2013 (UTC)
Aren't some of the English words and Latin (or Latin's direct descendant languages like French, Spanish, or other Romance languages) words nearly cognates by definition as 30% of English being derived from Latin words with another 30% being derived from a Norman/French background which in itself could be attributed to a Latin background? Not saying any words here are wrong, but some might warrant looking over especially when dealing with a progenitor language or two tongues that happen to be cousins. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.85.39.11 ( talk) 07:53, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
I wonder how to handle such cases as English name and Malay nama. The Malay word is a borrowing from Sanskrit nāman, which is an actual cognate of English name. If an example like this doesn't count, we're getting into trouble with a case such as Hungarian tíz, which is considered an early borrowing from Iranian – compare especially Ossetic dæs, a true cognate of Spanish diez. Counting borrowed cognates would obviously be impracticable and lead to an endless list full of uninteresting cases – but sometimes a borrowing is only suspected, not certain, for example in some of the Semitic/Indo-European equations, like in the numeral "seven". Is the possibility of a borrowing strong enough in the case of Hungarian tíz? My impression is that the hypothesis is pretty established, but it's not the most obvious case (and even obvious seeming cases such as Mbabaran dog can mislead). Where should the cut-off be? This one is a real headache. -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 13:41, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
False cognates, true friends I record how false cognates sound by speech synthesizers. -- Rostofanych ( talk) 07:50, 17 February 2014 (UTC)
I think that the definition of False Cognate is wrong in this article. This is what I found searching the internet, and please, if you found a credible source showing I'm wrong please respond because I'm going crazy with this.
The article states: False cognates are pairs of words in the same or different languages that are similar in form and meaning but have different roots.
While a more correct definition would be: False cognates are pairs of words in the same or different languages that are similar in form but have different roots and meaning.
And there's also a lot of confusion about the difference of False Cognate and False Friend even with dictionaries like Macmillan Dictionary using both terms as the same with the definition of "a word in a language that looks or sounds similar to a word in another language but means something different". [macmillion ref - Edited by user:IronMaidenRocks] and this article that is hosted by Brown, but I don't know if it's a article from them or they are just hosting.
The difference is that although both False Cognate and False Friend are similar words with different meaning, False Cognate don't have common origin while False Friend could have. It's like... all False Cognate are False Friend but not all False Friend are False Cognate. The problem is that my research in English either came with articles saying they are the same, or articles quoting the difference given in this article from wikipedia, witch does not have a source for the definition given, like this one from Princeton, that is just a copy of the wikipedia page.
One example of False Friend would be the word Fabric in English with the word Fábrica in Portuguese that means Factory, they have the same root, the word Fabrica in Latin but different meaning.
One example of False Cognate would be the word Cute in English with the word Cute in Portuguese that means Skin, they are the same word with different roots, Cute in English being the Latin word Acutus while the Portuguese Cute being the Latin word Cutis.
The articles that I found supporting my claim is not in English, being the most comprehensive one
this article in Portuguese. But since this terms were created in French, with the meaning being the same in almost every language, I don't think would be a problem.
Mateusmat (
talk) 13:01, 22 September 2014 (UTC)
I frankly think these are true cognates. "Din" in Persian appears to be a loan-word from Arabic (which is linguistically related to Hebrew). In Arabic, "din" does mean "religion". While in Hebrew "din" (דין) is used to refer to all kinds of laws (dinei nezikin=torts, din plili=criminal law, dinei mekarkein=real estate law, dinei kinyan ruchani=IP law, etc.), a "beit din" (בית דין) is specifically a court of religious law, and a dayan" (דיין) a religious judge. A secular court is called a "beit mishpat" and a judge there a "shofet" (originally meaning 'arbiter'). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.76.204.177 ( talk) 07:38, 4 January 2015 (UTC)
There are a number of items for which to say that they have similar pronunciation or similar meaning is stretching things a bit. For instance
Some may well be either true cognates or simple borrowings, sometimes from a third language, and need references
Some are just not relevant here since the pronunciations or meanings are too different, e.g.
The mama / papa type cognates which are listed under Tamil and Korean, (with a few others) are so general that they should be put in a little group of their own. Or left out altogether since they are described plainly in the article.
Imc ( talk) 20:28, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
Some historical linguists presume that all languages go back to a single common ancestor. Therefore, a pair of words whose earlier forms are distinct, yet similar, as far back as they have been traced, could in theory have come from a common root in an even earlier language, making them real cognates. The further back in time language reconstruction efforts go, however, the less confidence there can be in the outcome. Attempts at such reconstructions typically rely on just such pairings of superficially similar words, but the connections proposed by these theories tend to be conjectural, failing to document significant patterns of linguistic change. Under the disputed Nostratic theory and similar theories such as that of monogenesis, some of these examples would indeed be distantly related cognates, but the evidence for reclassifying them as such is insufficient. (Alternatively, apparent cognates in Eurasian language families far removed from each other could also be early loanwords, compare Wanderwort.) The Nostratic hypothesis is however based on the comparative method, unlike some other superfamily hypotheses.
There might be a slight risk of controversy, here, but I have removed the preceding section, which comes across as the result of an edit war between editors who disagreed about controversial hypotheses in historical linguistics. Controversies in historical linguistics are interesting, but this doesn't seem the right article for discussing them. Removing the silliness, all this passage is really saying is, "There can sometimes be disagreement over whether or not a pair of words really are false cognates," and that seems too obvious to even mention. However, if real controversies over supposed cognates have taken place in the literature of linguistics, it would be good to discuss them in the article. - Oliver P. ( talk) 01:31, 11 August 2015 (UTC)
The article claims these to be false cognates, because they do not derive from the same Proto-Germanic root. Is that really enough? How do we know they don't derive from the same PIE root? – Smiddle T C @ 13:15, 12 August 2015 (UTC)
Lots of unsubstantiated claims on this page. One of the first words I researched was not a false cognate. Shouldn't be too hard to check dictionaries for source. -- IronMaidenRocks ( talk) 00:37, 16 August 2015 (UTC)
Article gives no sources for most 'false cognates' and even the definition of such seems to be WP:OR. I'm assuming that most of these examples cannot be reliably sourced. I'm not even really sure the term as used here exists outside wikipedia and a few blog posts which use the term similarly. Also, several of the sourced 'false cognates' are from blogs. Please find better sources according to wp: reliable sources. I really have no idea how anyone here thinks they can add any text Wikipedia without a reliable source. Next time someone says 'don't trust Wikipedia', your behaviour is part of the reason.
This article has been around since 2001 and has never had any legitimate sources. If a source for at least the definition is not provided I will nominate this article for deletion, as at this point I believe it to be a creation of a sectarian Wikipedia community with little use outside some academic/linguistics parlance. -- IronMaidenRocks ( talk) 15:16, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
In many Bantu languages, e.g. Kikuyu "koma" means "to sleep". Is this a false cognate with old Greek "koma"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.223.164.85 ( talk) 23:55, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
Is there a website or forum where all this material could be moved, cataloged, and extrapolated upon? The material you're all collecting is interesting, but it just doesn't belong here. -- IronMaidenRocks ( talk) 14:45, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
Considering what Garik said above, how much of the list is actually possible to source? Are we ever going to find academics or other reputable sources saying 'yes, this and this are false cognates' or 'these words are thought to have the same origin, but do not'? Like, I always thought 'sole' and 'soul' had similar origins, but that's not the case. How can I establish that many people also think that way, enough for the reference to such a thing be notable? I can't without a good source. It's undue weight and original research otherwise, which of course, we've said over and over in these last few topics. -- IronMaidenRocks ( talk) 21:23, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/1326/1/fulltext.pdf This is used as the ref. for about five different words, but is an entire chapter from a book photocopied. The article's reference has no notation as to where the contextual material can be found. The source itself contains various notes in pencil, but doesn't say who the notes are from as far as I can tell. That's quite problematic if any of these pencil notes are being used as authoritative material. I don't know if that's the case, though. I'm not sure what tag to use for when an article's reference needs additional notation. If anyone knows this material, please add on what page and paragraph the contextual information occurs for each instance the source is used. If this material can be found in a more internet accessible format, please link it. -- IronMaidenRocks ( talk) 21:36, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
I was really confused by the claim that pretend is a false friend of prétendre. I'm a native French speaker in Canada and when I hear the word "prétendre", the first meaning I think of is "to claim as if something is true when it is not true". There is no other word to convey that meaning in French as far as I know.
This is also the main meaning of "pretend". Are words really false friends when they have the same principal meaning but also have other meanings? This is very different from "library" (bibliothèque) and "librairie" (bookstore), for example. It's very frequent for cognates in French and English to essentially have the same meaning but to also have nuances in their meaning depending on the context; I doubt we can claim that all these words are "false friends". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.212.252.210 ( talk • contribs)
Per tag from January, I've deleted the unsourced/unchallenged examples. Please find sources if you wish to add content to the article. -- IronMaidenRocks ( talk) 07:50, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
The list of supposed false cognates needs some serious revision. For example, French "feu" and German "Feuer" (not to mention "fire") are all from the same Proto-Germanic root (in French of course through Frankish), and ultimately from the same Indo-European root. Special care must be taken when dealing with Indo-European languages, even if they are quite different from each other, because there are many, many cognate terms among them, even when the languages would seem disparate to someone not familiar with the historical diffusion of Indo-European languages (eg Farsi/Persian, Hittite, Hindi/Sanskrit, Germanic languages, Lithuanian, Greek, and Romance languages). A true false cognate (a funny term, I know) would be something like sheriff/sharif, in which each language is in a different family and is known not to have borrowed the term from the other. I would love to revise the list myself, but I'm at best a dabbler when it comes to comparative historical linguistics, so it's something that should be undertaken by someone with some expertise in the field.
Mpaniello ( talk) 22:46, 4 May 2017 (UTC)Mpaniello
Booth "day", "dia", etc., derive from "dyau"-- MiguelMadeira ( talk) 16:32, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
Numerous word pairs in the Examples section are going to have to come out, even some of those having two citations. This is because they violate the core principle of no original research. WP:SYNTH says: Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources. An example of this is the following:
Note that neither of the two references say anything about the word pair being false cognates; they merely list the definition of each one. (It's even worse than that in this example, as the references point to Wiktionary, and Wiktionary is not a reliable source.) In fact, the only "source" for this being a false cognate pair, is the editor who decided they sounded alike, believed they were false cognates, and listed them here, relying on two definitions from two different sources to support that decision. That is a textbook example of synthesis, and is prohibited.
Any word pair in the list that has a reference that does not say anything about the pair being false cognates is not verified by that source, and may be challenged or removed. Any word pair having two references, where each reference is merely a definition of one of the two terms, is WP:SYNTH and may be challenged and removed. Putting it another way: it's not the job of editors to find words in different dictionaries (or different parts of the same dictionary) that have different etymological derivations, and then list them here when the dictionary or other source never mentioned the pair as false cognates; that's the very definition of original research. Instead, find one source that lists both words as false cognates of each other, and cite it. Mathglot ( talk) 01:44, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
An example of the latter, is this entry:
This is not WP:SYNTH, because the single source mentions that the two are false cognates. Mathglot ( talk) 07:52, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
References
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 eithical 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 religous teachers.
Would the fact that "mama" for "mother" has popped up independently in many languages mean that the "mama" words in the different languages are false cognates? The reason for this is not coincidental, but because the /m/ sound is easy for small children to pronounce. /b/, /p/, /d/ and /t/ are too, which is why words for "father" starting with those sounds are common in languages. 2600:1700:E660:9D60:907A:B04A:159B:F587 ( talk) 16:41, 19 July 2019 (UTC)
There are numerous word pairs in the article that are either not sourced, or improperly sourced, and I'm going to start removing them, per WP:V. Here's how to avoid that:
When adding word pairs to the lists, don't simply add random similar-sounding word pairs that sound similar and have different derivations; that's not enough. It's not sufficient that they have independent reliably-sourced etymologies back to two different PIE (or other) roots; the key question is, who is claiming that the pair are false cognates: 1) a published, independent, secondary, reliable source, or 2) a Wikipedia editor based on their analysis of word origins? If it's the former, it's okay to add it; if it's the latter, it is not.
This article is not an indiscriminate collection of everything that interested editors can turn up by hunting down pairs that look similar but have different derivations. The topic of False cognates is analyzed in countless published, reliable, secondary sources, and many, many reliable examples can be found and cited. There is no reason for us, as Wikipedia editors, to add examples of our own discovery, just because our research shows they have different derivations. Moreover, that would be WP:SYNTH and is prohibited. For further details on this point, please see the discussion #No synthesis of published material above.
Tl;dr: if you want to add a word pair to the article as "false cognates", find just one source that says they are false cognates, and cite it. If you can't find one, then don't add it. Mathglot ( talk) 00:20, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
The phrase "original research" (OR) is used on Wikipedia to refer to material (...) for which no reliable, published sources exist.
By "exists", the community means that the reliable source must have been published and still exist—somewhere in the world, in any language, whether or not it is reachable online—even if no source is currently named in the article. Articles that currently name zero references of any type may be fully compliant with this policy—so long as there is a reasonable expectation that every bit of material is supported by a published, reliable source.
Of course, if the statement stays completely unsourced for a long time, it can and must be removed.
I'm challenging the source Mozeson (2000) as WP:FRINGE; any claims in the article sourced *only* to this book need to be removed. Mozeson has completely abdicated any tools of linguistic analysis, and bases his conclusions about language and word origins on the Bible. Here is Mozeson from the Foreword:
Put away your dictionaries – with their charming old-fashioned myths of standardized spelling and pronounciation, [ sic] with their superstitious, tribal need to create a new language ("Indo-European") out of ignorance of the ancient one. Take out instead, your Bible – and a pair of human ears. ... I began from the Biblical given that Hebrew is the Mother tongue (Genesis, chapter 11). ... More English words can be clearly linked to Hebrew, than to Latin, Greek, or French.
This is the fringe of the fringe; he's in cloud-cuckoo land. As an example: on page 66, he gives the origin of the English word Each as coming from Hebrew Ekh-ud (Genesis 1:5), Earth as coming from Hebrew Eretz (Genesis 1:1), Egret as coming from Hebrew Ug-oor (Isaiah 38:14). Standard dictionaries source these words to proto-Indo-European roots: līk-, er-3, and ker-2).
Per the guideline at WP:FRINGE, no assertions of fact by Mozeson should be reported in this article, and he should be considered unreliable for any claims about language. Mathglot ( talk) 18:06, 4 September 2019 (UTC)
Day and diary are claimed not to be related, because they are derived from different PIE roots, one meaning 'to burn', the other meaning 'heaven'. Semantically it's not a problem, we could say, since in Hungarian the word ég has these two meanings: 'to burn', and 'sky'. Another coincidence, that it is claimed by linguists to be a coincidental homonymy of two words of different origins. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Istenaldja ( talk • contribs) 01:59, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
Those words have similar pronunciation and have the same meaning "and", but I'm sure they have a different origin, hence those words can be categorized as false cognate as well. Ekirahardian ( talk) 18:11, 5 October 2019 (UTC)
I'd only keep those examples where a non-expert might reasonably suspect cognate status.
Some examples that should be kept:
User38453838 ( talk) 10:13, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
User38453838 said,
I'd only keep those examples where a non-expert might reasonably suspect cognate status.
Yes, that sounds like a reasonable condition for inclusion in this article. But it isn't a sufficient condition. The other one, is that a reliable source documents the fact that the words are false cognates.
There is a SYNTH trap lying in wait here, whereby an eager and well-meaning editor finds two words that any reasonable person would agree look alike, then finds the words in two dictionaries (or other reliable sources) as having unrelated origins, and adds the word pair here, including citations to the two sources. This fails WP:SYNTH and must be removed. The reason is, that the editor is substituting their own judgment about what is a false cognate, over a statement in some published source that says that they are; the editor merely deduces that the words are false cognates, based on material they combined from two different sources, where neither one of the sources listed both together and claimed that they are false cognates. This is the very definition of WP:SYNTH, which is a type of original reasearch.
As you make additions to the article, please ensure that your source lists both words, and identifies them as false cognates. Having two different sources that identify the origin of just one of the words each, is not sufficient. Mathglot ( talk) 11:18, 9 December 2019 (UTC)
I also removed the sharif/sheriff main image, as I had removed the example. Also, the image caption stated that the meanings are different, which counts *against* considering them false cognates. User38453838 ( talk) 07:47, 11 December 2019 (UTC)
Could someone add Finnish poika and English boy? I don't have time to add references. Would be good to also mention Swedish pojke alongside the Finnish (Germanic language like English). Poika could be referenced from Finnish etymological dictionary, which can be found online AFAIK (the Estonian one definitely can, it mentions "poika" under the cognate "poeg"). I'm Estonian myself, but I suggest adding the Finnish entry since it's the more widely known language. (For Estonian, the derived word "poiss" sounds closer to the English than "poeg"; I don't think two actual cognates need to be listed as examples with the same false cognate though). For "boy", note that Wiktionary and Etymonline propose different etymologies.
More suggestions, can be sourced from e.g dictionaries:
Also, I suggest moving the haben/habere example into the English table and list English "have" alongside the German. Same with Feuer/feu.
User38453838 ( talk) 12:07, 9 December 2019 (UTC)
-- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 17:21, 9 December 2019 (UTC)
More proposals:
Italian ciao and Vietnamese chào seems to be a good example. -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 00:13, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
An interesting discourse, but entirely unsourced:
Section
Mama and papa type (less first sentence) from rev
931880783 of the article
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The striking cross-linguistical similarities between these terms are thought to result from the nature of language acquisition. According to Jakobson (1962) , these words are the first word-like sounds made by babbling babies; and parents tend to associate the first sound babies make with themselves and to employ them subsequently as part of their baby-talk lexicon. Thus, there is no need to ascribe the similarities to common ancestry. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that these terms are built up from speech sounds that are easy to produce ( nasals like [ m or [ n, typically for "mother" words, or plosives like [ p, [ b, [ t, [ d, typically for "father" words, along with the low vowel [ a). However, variants occur; for example, in Old Japanese, the word for "mother" was papa, and in Slavic languages, baba is a common nickname for "grandmother", as in Baba Yaga and babushka. In Georgian, the usual pattern (nasal for "mother", plosive for "father") is inverted: the word for "father" is mama, and the word for "mother" is deda. |
Preserving here, as a starting point for finding references, or modifying it, as appropriate. Mathglot ( talk) 22:31, 21 December 2019 (UTC)
The title should be “False cognates” (in the plural form). Compare it with “False friends”. SuzieMillen ( talk) 12:47, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
Can somebody please add English "name" & Japanese "namae"? I would but I'm not familiar with Wikipedia editing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.29.174.201 ( talk) 13:27, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
There is a mistake in this bibliographical reference:
de la Fuente, José Andrés Alonso (2010). "Urban legends: Turkish kayık 'boat' | "Eskimo" Qayaq 'Kayak'" (PDF). Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis. Retrieved 2015-03-06.
The author's given names are Jose Andres (I've omitted the diacritics) and Alonso is part of his family name: Alonso de la Fuente. S. Valkemirer ( talk) 13:22, 3 January 2021 (UTC)
There are some more word pairs that I think are false cognates, such as Vietnamese mới (From Proto-Vietic *ɓəːjʔ) and Thai ใหม่ (From Proto-Tai *ʰmɤːlᴮ), both mean "new" in English. Do you think that these two words are considered false cognates?
Quang, Bùi Huy (
talk) 13:36, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
Thank you Quang, Bùi Huy ( talk) 02:12, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
Also, are "Gwen" in English and "Quang" in Vietnamese false cognates? Quang, Bùi Huy ( talk) 13:46, 14 August 2021 (UTC)
Are these two false cognates? For practically my entire life I've believed that scholar was derived from the word school, but it turns out they have wildly different etymologies (School is Germanic, Scholar is Greek, and ultimately come from a different PIE root). Do you think they are similar enough to be considered false cognates? 218.214.92.142 ( talk) — Preceding undated comment added 09:05, 31 May 2021 (UTC)
In English, the word 'meal' can refer to the flour of some grain, mainly wheat. In Korean, the word '밀'/mil/ means wheat. 𝒞𝒽ℯℯ𝓈ℯ𝒹ℴℊ ( talk) 11:53, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
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Is this a false cognate? 1907AbsoluTurk ( talk) 12:48, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
These three words, which I've for a long time suspected of being cognates (they sound very similarly and all are military-related), apparently derive from three different sources ("march" is from PIE *mereg "edge, boundary", "marshal" is from PIE *markos "horse" (well that's what Wiktionary says), and "martial" is from the Latin god Mars<*Mavors, which almost certainly isn't from either of the above). Do you think that this triple (or at least part of it) is significant enough to be included in the article? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.141.164.64 ( talk) 21:34, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
The entry for מסתורין ("mistorin" - mystery) in the Hebrew Wiktionary reads roughly:
...
Etymology:
1. While the root of the word מסתורין is ס-ת-ר, it's source is the Greek word μυστηριον (Mystirion), which means a secret, secret rituals. Many other languages derive their "mystery" from the same source.
2. In the Talmud, the word is usually written, as transliterated Greek, with the letter teth (ט) as מסטורין, but also with tav, signaling its connection to the Hebrew root [My comment: The Hebrew root סתר is associated with, among other things, hiding and obscurity as in the words להסתיר (to hide) or נסתר (hidden, obscure)]
3. Other Hebrew words were also renovated based on the meaning of the Hebrew root and similarity in sound to a foreign word (גאון (gaon) - genious, מסכה (masekha) - mask and more)
...
I'm not a linguist myself, and I'm not sure what's the best thing to do here: on the one hand, the words are false cognates, in the sense that the meaning of the Hebrew word is derived from the Hebrew root which doesn't share a root (as far as I know) with the Greek word.
On the other hand, this is a much weaker form of false cognates, as the Greek word only resembled a previously nonexistent structure of the root סתר (s.t.r), and was essentially borrowed and fitted to look like a Hebrew word.
Any ideas? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.65.201.192 ( talk) 22:44, 13 November 2012 (UTC)
Estonian mina/Finnish minä (I), and Zulu mina (I); also in Turkish men/ben (I), in English me/my/mine ,etc. a Black African Aurignacian word??? (so NOT a false cognate!) Böri ( talk) 13:53, 4 March 2013 (UTC)
Both minä - men / ben and sinä - sen are resembles a lot. There are also minun - menim, sinun - senin, hän - an etc. -- 88.251.4.159 ( talk) 04:11, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
If I were to follow the reasoning of this revert strictly, I'd have to remove the entire list of examples because almost none are reliably sourced. However, per WP:PRESERVE, it would be wise to find a better place on another Wikimedia project to put these false cognates. In this archived section, I suggested making it a Wiktionary appendix, but it never got anywhere. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Damian Yerrick ( talk • contribs)
Some words came from the Ice Age. Böri ( talk) 11:32, 2 November 2013 (UTC)
Aren't some of the English words and Latin (or Latin's direct descendant languages like French, Spanish, or other Romance languages) words nearly cognates by definition as 30% of English being derived from Latin words with another 30% being derived from a Norman/French background which in itself could be attributed to a Latin background? Not saying any words here are wrong, but some might warrant looking over especially when dealing with a progenitor language or two tongues that happen to be cousins. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.85.39.11 ( talk) 07:53, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
I wonder how to handle such cases as English name and Malay nama. The Malay word is a borrowing from Sanskrit nāman, which is an actual cognate of English name. If an example like this doesn't count, we're getting into trouble with a case such as Hungarian tíz, which is considered an early borrowing from Iranian – compare especially Ossetic dæs, a true cognate of Spanish diez. Counting borrowed cognates would obviously be impracticable and lead to an endless list full of uninteresting cases – but sometimes a borrowing is only suspected, not certain, for example in some of the Semitic/Indo-European equations, like in the numeral "seven". Is the possibility of a borrowing strong enough in the case of Hungarian tíz? My impression is that the hypothesis is pretty established, but it's not the most obvious case (and even obvious seeming cases such as Mbabaran dog can mislead). Where should the cut-off be? This one is a real headache. -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 13:41, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
False cognates, true friends I record how false cognates sound by speech synthesizers. -- Rostofanych ( talk) 07:50, 17 February 2014 (UTC)
I think that the definition of False Cognate is wrong in this article. This is what I found searching the internet, and please, if you found a credible source showing I'm wrong please respond because I'm going crazy with this.
The article states: False cognates are pairs of words in the same or different languages that are similar in form and meaning but have different roots.
While a more correct definition would be: False cognates are pairs of words in the same or different languages that are similar in form but have different roots and meaning.
And there's also a lot of confusion about the difference of False Cognate and False Friend even with dictionaries like Macmillan Dictionary using both terms as the same with the definition of "a word in a language that looks or sounds similar to a word in another language but means something different". [macmillion ref - Edited by user:IronMaidenRocks] and this article that is hosted by Brown, but I don't know if it's a article from them or they are just hosting.
The difference is that although both False Cognate and False Friend are similar words with different meaning, False Cognate don't have common origin while False Friend could have. It's like... all False Cognate are False Friend but not all False Friend are False Cognate. The problem is that my research in English either came with articles saying they are the same, or articles quoting the difference given in this article from wikipedia, witch does not have a source for the definition given, like this one from Princeton, that is just a copy of the wikipedia page.
One example of False Friend would be the word Fabric in English with the word Fábrica in Portuguese that means Factory, they have the same root, the word Fabrica in Latin but different meaning.
One example of False Cognate would be the word Cute in English with the word Cute in Portuguese that means Skin, they are the same word with different roots, Cute in English being the Latin word Acutus while the Portuguese Cute being the Latin word Cutis.
The articles that I found supporting my claim is not in English, being the most comprehensive one
this article in Portuguese. But since this terms were created in French, with the meaning being the same in almost every language, I don't think would be a problem.
Mateusmat (
talk) 13:01, 22 September 2014 (UTC)
I frankly think these are true cognates. "Din" in Persian appears to be a loan-word from Arabic (which is linguistically related to Hebrew). In Arabic, "din" does mean "religion". While in Hebrew "din" (דין) is used to refer to all kinds of laws (dinei nezikin=torts, din plili=criminal law, dinei mekarkein=real estate law, dinei kinyan ruchani=IP law, etc.), a "beit din" (בית דין) is specifically a court of religious law, and a dayan" (דיין) a religious judge. A secular court is called a "beit mishpat" and a judge there a "shofet" (originally meaning 'arbiter'). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.76.204.177 ( talk) 07:38, 4 January 2015 (UTC)
There are a number of items for which to say that they have similar pronunciation or similar meaning is stretching things a bit. For instance
Some may well be either true cognates or simple borrowings, sometimes from a third language, and need references
Some are just not relevant here since the pronunciations or meanings are too different, e.g.
The mama / papa type cognates which are listed under Tamil and Korean, (with a few others) are so general that they should be put in a little group of their own. Or left out altogether since they are described plainly in the article.
Imc ( talk) 20:28, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
Some historical linguists presume that all languages go back to a single common ancestor. Therefore, a pair of words whose earlier forms are distinct, yet similar, as far back as they have been traced, could in theory have come from a common root in an even earlier language, making them real cognates. The further back in time language reconstruction efforts go, however, the less confidence there can be in the outcome. Attempts at such reconstructions typically rely on just such pairings of superficially similar words, but the connections proposed by these theories tend to be conjectural, failing to document significant patterns of linguistic change. Under the disputed Nostratic theory and similar theories such as that of monogenesis, some of these examples would indeed be distantly related cognates, but the evidence for reclassifying them as such is insufficient. (Alternatively, apparent cognates in Eurasian language families far removed from each other could also be early loanwords, compare Wanderwort.) The Nostratic hypothesis is however based on the comparative method, unlike some other superfamily hypotheses.
There might be a slight risk of controversy, here, but I have removed the preceding section, which comes across as the result of an edit war between editors who disagreed about controversial hypotheses in historical linguistics. Controversies in historical linguistics are interesting, but this doesn't seem the right article for discussing them. Removing the silliness, all this passage is really saying is, "There can sometimes be disagreement over whether or not a pair of words really are false cognates," and that seems too obvious to even mention. However, if real controversies over supposed cognates have taken place in the literature of linguistics, it would be good to discuss them in the article. - Oliver P. ( talk) 01:31, 11 August 2015 (UTC)
The article claims these to be false cognates, because they do not derive from the same Proto-Germanic root. Is that really enough? How do we know they don't derive from the same PIE root? – Smiddle T C @ 13:15, 12 August 2015 (UTC)
Lots of unsubstantiated claims on this page. One of the first words I researched was not a false cognate. Shouldn't be too hard to check dictionaries for source. -- IronMaidenRocks ( talk) 00:37, 16 August 2015 (UTC)
Article gives no sources for most 'false cognates' and even the definition of such seems to be WP:OR. I'm assuming that most of these examples cannot be reliably sourced. I'm not even really sure the term as used here exists outside wikipedia and a few blog posts which use the term similarly. Also, several of the sourced 'false cognates' are from blogs. Please find better sources according to wp: reliable sources. I really have no idea how anyone here thinks they can add any text Wikipedia without a reliable source. Next time someone says 'don't trust Wikipedia', your behaviour is part of the reason.
This article has been around since 2001 and has never had any legitimate sources. If a source for at least the definition is not provided I will nominate this article for deletion, as at this point I believe it to be a creation of a sectarian Wikipedia community with little use outside some academic/linguistics parlance. -- IronMaidenRocks ( talk) 15:16, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
In many Bantu languages, e.g. Kikuyu "koma" means "to sleep". Is this a false cognate with old Greek "koma"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.223.164.85 ( talk) 23:55, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
Is there a website or forum where all this material could be moved, cataloged, and extrapolated upon? The material you're all collecting is interesting, but it just doesn't belong here. -- IronMaidenRocks ( talk) 14:45, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
Considering what Garik said above, how much of the list is actually possible to source? Are we ever going to find academics or other reputable sources saying 'yes, this and this are false cognates' or 'these words are thought to have the same origin, but do not'? Like, I always thought 'sole' and 'soul' had similar origins, but that's not the case. How can I establish that many people also think that way, enough for the reference to such a thing be notable? I can't without a good source. It's undue weight and original research otherwise, which of course, we've said over and over in these last few topics. -- IronMaidenRocks ( talk) 21:23, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/1326/1/fulltext.pdf This is used as the ref. for about five different words, but is an entire chapter from a book photocopied. The article's reference has no notation as to where the contextual material can be found. The source itself contains various notes in pencil, but doesn't say who the notes are from as far as I can tell. That's quite problematic if any of these pencil notes are being used as authoritative material. I don't know if that's the case, though. I'm not sure what tag to use for when an article's reference needs additional notation. If anyone knows this material, please add on what page and paragraph the contextual information occurs for each instance the source is used. If this material can be found in a more internet accessible format, please link it. -- IronMaidenRocks ( talk) 21:36, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
I was really confused by the claim that pretend is a false friend of prétendre. I'm a native French speaker in Canada and when I hear the word "prétendre", the first meaning I think of is "to claim as if something is true when it is not true". There is no other word to convey that meaning in French as far as I know.
This is also the main meaning of "pretend". Are words really false friends when they have the same principal meaning but also have other meanings? This is very different from "library" (bibliothèque) and "librairie" (bookstore), for example. It's very frequent for cognates in French and English to essentially have the same meaning but to also have nuances in their meaning depending on the context; I doubt we can claim that all these words are "false friends". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.212.252.210 ( talk • contribs)
Per tag from January, I've deleted the unsourced/unchallenged examples. Please find sources if you wish to add content to the article. -- IronMaidenRocks ( talk) 07:50, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
The list of supposed false cognates needs some serious revision. For example, French "feu" and German "Feuer" (not to mention "fire") are all from the same Proto-Germanic root (in French of course through Frankish), and ultimately from the same Indo-European root. Special care must be taken when dealing with Indo-European languages, even if they are quite different from each other, because there are many, many cognate terms among them, even when the languages would seem disparate to someone not familiar with the historical diffusion of Indo-European languages (eg Farsi/Persian, Hittite, Hindi/Sanskrit, Germanic languages, Lithuanian, Greek, and Romance languages). A true false cognate (a funny term, I know) would be something like sheriff/sharif, in which each language is in a different family and is known not to have borrowed the term from the other. I would love to revise the list myself, but I'm at best a dabbler when it comes to comparative historical linguistics, so it's something that should be undertaken by someone with some expertise in the field.
Mpaniello ( talk) 22:46, 4 May 2017 (UTC)Mpaniello
Booth "day", "dia", etc., derive from "dyau"-- MiguelMadeira ( talk) 16:32, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
Numerous word pairs in the Examples section are going to have to come out, even some of those having two citations. This is because they violate the core principle of no original research. WP:SYNTH says: Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources. An example of this is the following:
Note that neither of the two references say anything about the word pair being false cognates; they merely list the definition of each one. (It's even worse than that in this example, as the references point to Wiktionary, and Wiktionary is not a reliable source.) In fact, the only "source" for this being a false cognate pair, is the editor who decided they sounded alike, believed they were false cognates, and listed them here, relying on two definitions from two different sources to support that decision. That is a textbook example of synthesis, and is prohibited.
Any word pair in the list that has a reference that does not say anything about the pair being false cognates is not verified by that source, and may be challenged or removed. Any word pair having two references, where each reference is merely a definition of one of the two terms, is WP:SYNTH and may be challenged and removed. Putting it another way: it's not the job of editors to find words in different dictionaries (or different parts of the same dictionary) that have different etymological derivations, and then list them here when the dictionary or other source never mentioned the pair as false cognates; that's the very definition of original research. Instead, find one source that lists both words as false cognates of each other, and cite it. Mathglot ( talk) 01:44, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
An example of the latter, is this entry:
This is not WP:SYNTH, because the single source mentions that the two are false cognates. Mathglot ( talk) 07:52, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
References
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 eithical 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 religous teachers.
Would the fact that "mama" for "mother" has popped up independently in many languages mean that the "mama" words in the different languages are false cognates? The reason for this is not coincidental, but because the /m/ sound is easy for small children to pronounce. /b/, /p/, /d/ and /t/ are too, which is why words for "father" starting with those sounds are common in languages. 2600:1700:E660:9D60:907A:B04A:159B:F587 ( talk) 16:41, 19 July 2019 (UTC)
There are numerous word pairs in the article that are either not sourced, or improperly sourced, and I'm going to start removing them, per WP:V. Here's how to avoid that:
When adding word pairs to the lists, don't simply add random similar-sounding word pairs that sound similar and have different derivations; that's not enough. It's not sufficient that they have independent reliably-sourced etymologies back to two different PIE (or other) roots; the key question is, who is claiming that the pair are false cognates: 1) a published, independent, secondary, reliable source, or 2) a Wikipedia editor based on their analysis of word origins? If it's the former, it's okay to add it; if it's the latter, it is not.
This article is not an indiscriminate collection of everything that interested editors can turn up by hunting down pairs that look similar but have different derivations. The topic of False cognates is analyzed in countless published, reliable, secondary sources, and many, many reliable examples can be found and cited. There is no reason for us, as Wikipedia editors, to add examples of our own discovery, just because our research shows they have different derivations. Moreover, that would be WP:SYNTH and is prohibited. For further details on this point, please see the discussion #No synthesis of published material above.
Tl;dr: if you want to add a word pair to the article as "false cognates", find just one source that says they are false cognates, and cite it. If you can't find one, then don't add it. Mathglot ( talk) 00:20, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
The phrase "original research" (OR) is used on Wikipedia to refer to material (...) for which no reliable, published sources exist.
By "exists", the community means that the reliable source must have been published and still exist—somewhere in the world, in any language, whether or not it is reachable online—even if no source is currently named in the article. Articles that currently name zero references of any type may be fully compliant with this policy—so long as there is a reasonable expectation that every bit of material is supported by a published, reliable source.
Of course, if the statement stays completely unsourced for a long time, it can and must be removed.
I'm challenging the source Mozeson (2000) as WP:FRINGE; any claims in the article sourced *only* to this book need to be removed. Mozeson has completely abdicated any tools of linguistic analysis, and bases his conclusions about language and word origins on the Bible. Here is Mozeson from the Foreword:
Put away your dictionaries – with their charming old-fashioned myths of standardized spelling and pronounciation, [ sic] with their superstitious, tribal need to create a new language ("Indo-European") out of ignorance of the ancient one. Take out instead, your Bible – and a pair of human ears. ... I began from the Biblical given that Hebrew is the Mother tongue (Genesis, chapter 11). ... More English words can be clearly linked to Hebrew, than to Latin, Greek, or French.
This is the fringe of the fringe; he's in cloud-cuckoo land. As an example: on page 66, he gives the origin of the English word Each as coming from Hebrew Ekh-ud (Genesis 1:5), Earth as coming from Hebrew Eretz (Genesis 1:1), Egret as coming from Hebrew Ug-oor (Isaiah 38:14). Standard dictionaries source these words to proto-Indo-European roots: līk-, er-3, and ker-2).
Per the guideline at WP:FRINGE, no assertions of fact by Mozeson should be reported in this article, and he should be considered unreliable for any claims about language. Mathglot ( talk) 18:06, 4 September 2019 (UTC)
Day and diary are claimed not to be related, because they are derived from different PIE roots, one meaning 'to burn', the other meaning 'heaven'. Semantically it's not a problem, we could say, since in Hungarian the word ég has these two meanings: 'to burn', and 'sky'. Another coincidence, that it is claimed by linguists to be a coincidental homonymy of two words of different origins. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Istenaldja ( talk • contribs) 01:59, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
Those words have similar pronunciation and have the same meaning "and", but I'm sure they have a different origin, hence those words can be categorized as false cognate as well. Ekirahardian ( talk) 18:11, 5 October 2019 (UTC)
I'd only keep those examples where a non-expert might reasonably suspect cognate status.
Some examples that should be kept:
User38453838 ( talk) 10:13, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
User38453838 said,
I'd only keep those examples where a non-expert might reasonably suspect cognate status.
Yes, that sounds like a reasonable condition for inclusion in this article. But it isn't a sufficient condition. The other one, is that a reliable source documents the fact that the words are false cognates.
There is a SYNTH trap lying in wait here, whereby an eager and well-meaning editor finds two words that any reasonable person would agree look alike, then finds the words in two dictionaries (or other reliable sources) as having unrelated origins, and adds the word pair here, including citations to the two sources. This fails WP:SYNTH and must be removed. The reason is, that the editor is substituting their own judgment about what is a false cognate, over a statement in some published source that says that they are; the editor merely deduces that the words are false cognates, based on material they combined from two different sources, where neither one of the sources listed both together and claimed that they are false cognates. This is the very definition of WP:SYNTH, which is a type of original reasearch.
As you make additions to the article, please ensure that your source lists both words, and identifies them as false cognates. Having two different sources that identify the origin of just one of the words each, is not sufficient. Mathglot ( talk) 11:18, 9 December 2019 (UTC)
I also removed the sharif/sheriff main image, as I had removed the example. Also, the image caption stated that the meanings are different, which counts *against* considering them false cognates. User38453838 ( talk) 07:47, 11 December 2019 (UTC)
Could someone add Finnish poika and English boy? I don't have time to add references. Would be good to also mention Swedish pojke alongside the Finnish (Germanic language like English). Poika could be referenced from Finnish etymological dictionary, which can be found online AFAIK (the Estonian one definitely can, it mentions "poika" under the cognate "poeg"). I'm Estonian myself, but I suggest adding the Finnish entry since it's the more widely known language. (For Estonian, the derived word "poiss" sounds closer to the English than "poeg"; I don't think two actual cognates need to be listed as examples with the same false cognate though). For "boy", note that Wiktionary and Etymonline propose different etymologies.
More suggestions, can be sourced from e.g dictionaries:
Also, I suggest moving the haben/habere example into the English table and list English "have" alongside the German. Same with Feuer/feu.
User38453838 ( talk) 12:07, 9 December 2019 (UTC)
-- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 17:21, 9 December 2019 (UTC)
More proposals:
Italian ciao and Vietnamese chào seems to be a good example. -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 00:13, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
An interesting discourse, but entirely unsourced:
Section
Mama and papa type (less first sentence) from rev
931880783 of the article
|
---|
The striking cross-linguistical similarities between these terms are thought to result from the nature of language acquisition. According to Jakobson (1962) , these words are the first word-like sounds made by babbling babies; and parents tend to associate the first sound babies make with themselves and to employ them subsequently as part of their baby-talk lexicon. Thus, there is no need to ascribe the similarities to common ancestry. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that these terms are built up from speech sounds that are easy to produce ( nasals like [ m or [ n, typically for "mother" words, or plosives like [ p, [ b, [ t, [ d, typically for "father" words, along with the low vowel [ a). However, variants occur; for example, in Old Japanese, the word for "mother" was papa, and in Slavic languages, baba is a common nickname for "grandmother", as in Baba Yaga and babushka. In Georgian, the usual pattern (nasal for "mother", plosive for "father") is inverted: the word for "father" is mama, and the word for "mother" is deda. |
Preserving here, as a starting point for finding references, or modifying it, as appropriate. Mathglot ( talk) 22:31, 21 December 2019 (UTC)
The title should be “False cognates” (in the plural form). Compare it with “False friends”. SuzieMillen ( talk) 12:47, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
Can somebody please add English "name" & Japanese "namae"? I would but I'm not familiar with Wikipedia editing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.29.174.201 ( talk) 13:27, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
There is a mistake in this bibliographical reference:
de la Fuente, José Andrés Alonso (2010). "Urban legends: Turkish kayık 'boat' | "Eskimo" Qayaq 'Kayak'" (PDF). Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis. Retrieved 2015-03-06.
The author's given names are Jose Andres (I've omitted the diacritics) and Alonso is part of his family name: Alonso de la Fuente. S. Valkemirer ( talk) 13:22, 3 January 2021 (UTC)
There are some more word pairs that I think are false cognates, such as Vietnamese mới (From Proto-Vietic *ɓəːjʔ) and Thai ใหม่ (From Proto-Tai *ʰmɤːlᴮ), both mean "new" in English. Do you think that these two words are considered false cognates?
Quang, Bùi Huy (
talk) 13:36, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
Thank you Quang, Bùi Huy ( talk) 02:12, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
Also, are "Gwen" in English and "Quang" in Vietnamese false cognates? Quang, Bùi Huy ( talk) 13:46, 14 August 2021 (UTC)
Are these two false cognates? For practically my entire life I've believed that scholar was derived from the word school, but it turns out they have wildly different etymologies (School is Germanic, Scholar is Greek, and ultimately come from a different PIE root). Do you think they are similar enough to be considered false cognates? 218.214.92.142 ( talk) — Preceding undated comment added 09:05, 31 May 2021 (UTC)
In English, the word 'meal' can refer to the flour of some grain, mainly wheat. In Korean, the word '밀'/mil/ means wheat. 𝒞𝒽ℯℯ𝓈ℯ𝒹ℴℊ ( talk) 11:53, 29 March 2024 (UTC)