Today I Learned (TIL)

6546 readers

1 users here now

You learn something new every day; what did you learn today?

/c/til is a community for any true knowledge that you would like to share, regardless of topic or of source.

Share your knowledge and experience!

Rules

Information must be true
Follow site rules
No, you don't have to have literally learned the fact today
Posts must be about something you learned

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

100

TIL about False cognates, pairs of words [with] similar sounds and meaning, but different etymologies; "For example, the English word dog and the Mbabaram word dog" (en.m.wikipedia.org)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

There is a table of examples in the link. Some I saw include:

Desert

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)

Shark

shark Middle English shark from uncertain origin
Chinese 鲨 (shā) Named as its crude skin similar to sand (沙 (shā))

Kayak

Inuktitut ᖃᔭᖅ (kayak) Proto-Eskimo *qyaq
Turkish kayık ('small boat')[17] Old Turkic kayguk << Proto-Turkic kay- ("to slide, to turn")

A lot of these could be TIL posts of their own.

I also wonder if some of these are actually false cognates, or if there is a much earlier common origin with false associations that came afterwards

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

Danke 💕 I was half asleep reading it as well, that might not have helped.

I'm not really gifted, language wise, but I'm pretty interested. I love watching this one YouTuber of which which I forgot (Brit which seems to live in Germany, explaining things like the great vowel shift (aha, remembered! https://youtu.be/fmL6FClRC_s) and I'm fascinated by the similarities of old English and modern German. But I won't ever be able to keep things like those "For example /t͡ʃ/ is as in ⟨chill⟩, /θ/ is as in ⟨think⟩, /kʷ/ is as in ⟨queen⟩ but Latin handles it as a single unit, etc." in memory.

I understand it as I'm reading, but it'll be gone tomorrow. Washed away by some algorithm in trying to get working.

But thank you so much, it was a pleasure reading 💖