Re: Pseudo-cognates?


Harlan Messinger wrote:
erilar wrote:
In article <4uah9hF15tjbcU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Harlan Messinger <hmessinger.removethis@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

izzy wrote:
Snis Pilbor wrote:
Is there a special word for the event when two languages share a word,
but only by sheer coincidence, NOT ... because of common heritage?
Informally, they are called "sound-alikes". Sometimes they are called
"false friends".
False friends aren't sheer coincidence--they're words that *are* related
but that cause confusion because their meanings are different. Examples
are English "eventual" and French "eventuel" (= "possible"), English
"actual" and French "actuel" (= "current", "at the moment"), English
"smoking" and French "smoking" (= "smoking jacket").

What the OP is asking about is words that *appear* to be false friends
but that aren't.

I believe "tori(or something with "tor" in it at any rate) is a kind of
gate in Japanese?? Tor is a gate in German. I can see no way these two
words can have any kind of linguistic relationship. So are they "false
friends"?

No, that's the point. They're false cognates. Again, false friends are
*real* cognates. Review my examples above. French "smoking," for
example, is definitely cognate with English "smoking"--it's a direct
loanword. But its meaning as used in French isn't "smoking". "J'aime
bien son smoking" doesn't mean "I like his smoking", it means "I like
his smoking jacket".

In "Ocean's Twelve", when the French character Toulour, played by
Vincent Cassel, tells Tess, played by Julia Roberts, who in the film
pretends at one point to be Julia Roberts, that she doesn't look
anything like Julia Roberts, he says, "Oh, by the way, I gotta tell you
something. You don't look anything like her. Eventually the nose, but
the ears and, I mean, the way you walk and you dress ...." (It was quite
clever of the screenwriter to throw this into the script. Or maybe
Cassel, an actual Frenchman, thought of it.) Toulour says "eventually"
to translate the French word "éventuellement", which is cognate with
"eventually", and which would have been applicable, but the English word
"eventually" incorrectly translates "éventuellement". They're false
friends. A correct translation would have been "perhaps" or "possibly".

In Serbian the word 'zamagliti' means 'fog', 'zamagliti se' (blur,
mist), 'zamagljen' (shadowy, blear, misty, vaporous, matted);
also, there is the word 'zamaknuti' (remove, displace, take away, GET
OUT OF SIGHT) which explains the development of the above 'zamagliti'
(to fog) and 'magla' (fog)
Serbian 'zamak' (manor, castle) is a protective citadel; i.e. a
stronghold into which people could go for shelter during a battle or
the place were you can 'zamaknuti' (Serb. izmaknuti slink off) in a
time of trouble.

DV

.

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