Cognates

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Re: Cognates

Postby linguoboy » 2014-11-13, 22:19

Speculation here, but it looks to me like the Alemannic Urschili "sty" might be a descendent of Latin hordeolus and thus a true cognate of French orgelet, Spanish orzuelo, Italian orzaiolo, Catalan urçol, Rumanian urcior. At least, if it's a diminutive of a native German word, I can't imagine what that would be.

(The Standard German word, incidentally, is a calque: Gersternkorn.)
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Re: Cognates

Postby vijayjohn » 2014-11-15, 21:47

This paper seems to say that Urschili is borrowed from French orgelet.

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Re: Cognates

Postby loqu » 2014-11-17, 0:20

Urschili makes me think of chili that was cooked thirty centuries ago.
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Re: Cognates

Postby Bubulus » 2014-11-18, 17:21

loqu wrote:
sa wulfs wrote:
loqu wrote:Yes, that always striked me, because we Western Andalusians pronounce the 'h' that comes from a Latin 'f' the same way we pronounce the 'j', but that one is accepted in Standard Spanish as 'j'. Must be the only word in that case.

What about juerga alongside huelga, ultimately from follicāre?

Wow, do they really come from the same Latin word? This is even more interesting, since juerga also has that Andalusian l/r neutralization.
Wait, so juerga isn't just the Andalusian pronunciation of huelga? Are these two words a doublet in Spain? (We don't use juerga at all in El Salvador.) Why are you surprised they come from the same Latin word?

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Re: Cognates

Postby vijayjohn » 2014-11-19, 3:31

Querubín wrote:Wait, so juerga isn't just the Andalusian pronunciation of huelga?

Apparently not.

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Re: Cognates

Postby loqu » 2014-11-19, 9:51

Querubín wrote:
loqu wrote:
sa wulfs wrote:
loqu wrote:Yes, that always striked me, because we Western Andalusians pronounce the 'h' that comes from a Latin 'f' the same way we pronounce the 'j', but that one is accepted in Standard Spanish as 'j'. Must be the only word in that case.

What about juerga alongside huelga, ultimately from follicāre?

Wow, do they really come from the same Latin word? This is even more interesting, since juerga also has that Andalusian l/r neutralization.
Wait, so juerga isn't just the Andalusian pronunciation of huelga? Are these two words a doublet in Spain? (We don't use juerga at all in El Salvador.) Why are you surprised they come from the same Latin word?

No, it's not the same word, we have both in Spain indeed. In W. Andalusian they are pronounced [ˈweɾɣa] and [ˈhweɾɣa].

I was surprised because I never realized there was any connection between those two words.
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Re: Cognates

Postby Linguist » 2014-11-19, 20:14

In Margabor Republic, we use huelga to emphasize that something went wrong
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Re: Cognates

Postby Babelfish » 2014-12-05, 20:05

mōdgethanc wrote:I always found this one to be interesting:

[flag=]ar[/flag] قتل qatala "kill"
[flag=]he[/flag] קָטַל qāṭal "kill"

The Hebrew word has an emphatic /t/ while the Arabic doesn't, and there is no phonological reason why this would be so.

Took me quite a while... but I finally recalled a couple of similar pairs, where the letters used in Hebrew and Arabic aren't the usual parallels of each other:
  • Dance: [flag=]he[/flag] רקד raqad, [flag=]ar[/flag] رقض raqạda
  • Jump: [flag=]he[/flag] קפץ qafats, [flag=]ar[/flag] قفز qafaza
  • Laugh: [flag=]he[/flag] צחק tsaḥaq, [flag=]ar[/flag] ضحك ̣daḥika
Perhaps there just isn't much logic behind these sound changes specifically...
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Re: Cognates

Postby vijayjohn » 2014-12-06, 9:02

The words for 'land' in several varieties of [flag="Quechua"]qu[/flag]:

Ancash: [alba]
Junin: [alʲpa]
Cajamarca: [aʃpa]
Amazonas: [adʒpa]
Ecuador: [aʒpa]
Ayacucho: [alʲpa]
Cusco: [halʲp'a]

The odd thing about this is the word-initial [h] in the Cusco variety. So far, this is the only word I've seen where that one variety has it and none of the others do.

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Re: Cognates

Postby vijayjohn » 2014-12-07, 6:39

[flag="Malay"]ms[/flag]/[flag="Indonesian"]id[/flag] danaw - lake, sheet of enclosed water
[flag="Tagalog"]tl[/flag] danaw - lagoon, pond
[flag="Tagalog"]tl[/flag] lanaw - pool, small lake, lagoon
[flag="Malagasy"]mg[/flag] rano - water
[flag="Fijian"]fj[/flag] drano - a lake or piece of fresh water inland

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Re: Cognates

Postby vijayjohn » 2015-01-25, 8:22

OK, it hasn't been firmly established that these languages (Ket and Navajo) are related yet, but Dené-Yeniseian is at least a proposal that is taken relatively seriously among linguists.

Ket (ket) ты’сь [təˀs] 'stone'
Navajo (nv) tsé 'stone'

Ket (ket) ки’сь [kiˀs] 'foot'
Navajo (nv) akee' 'somebody's foot'

Ket (ket) синьсь [sīn] 'old'
Navajo (nv) sání 'old'

Ket (ket) тиг, тих [tìɣ] 'snake'
Navajo (nv) tł'iish 'snake'

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Re: Cognates

Postby Multiturquoise » 2015-01-26, 10:24

[flag=]tr[/flag] karpuz - watermelon
[flag=]el[/flag] καρπούζι - watermelon
native: (tr)
advanced: (en) (el)
intermediate: (fr) (ka)
focus: (de) (sl) (hr)

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Re: Cognates

Postby Johanna » 2015-01-26, 18:18

Aisling wrote:[flag=]tr[/flag] karpuz - watermelon
[flag=]el[/flag] καρπούζι - watermelon

Those aren't cognates, one language simply borrowed the word from the other.
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Re: Cognates

Postby linguoboy » 2015-01-26, 18:21

Johanna wrote:
Aisling wrote:[flag=]tr[/flag] karpuz - watermelon
[flag=]el[/flag] καρπούζι - watermelon

Those aren't cognates, one language simply borrowed the word from the other.
Isn't that one accepted definition of "cognate"?
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Re: Cognates

Postby Johanna » 2015-01-26, 18:45

linguoboy wrote:Isn't that one accepted definition of "cognate"?

Is it? I haven't heard anyone talking about loan words as cognates before, not when one of the languages involved is the source anyway, then it's simply been 'loan'. But you know these things better than me :)
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Re: Cognates

Postby linguoboy » 2015-01-26, 19:10

Johanna wrote:
linguoboy wrote:Isn't that one accepted definition of "cognate"?

Is it? I haven't heard anyone talking about loan words as cognates before, not when one of the languages involved is the source anyway, then it's simply been 'loan'. But you know these things better than me :)
It depends very much on context. When it comes to comparative work (and "cognate" is most often used in comparative contexts), what you care most about are inherited cognates, since these are what yield proof of genetic relationships. But in discussions of, say, mutual intelligibility, a cognate is a cognate regardless of how it got that way. After all, the average speaker has no way of distinguishing borrowings from inherited vocabulary (and, in fact, frequently focuses on the former in discussions of how "close" two languages are). I think the notes to the Wikipedia article for cognate make this point quite well.

I went back to the start of the thread and the OP doesn't specify what definition of "cognate" he's using, so I've been assuming that both the narrower and the broader definitions are acceptable here.
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Re: Cognates

Postby Johanna » 2015-01-26, 20:09

I see. Thanks for the explanation and checking the OP :)
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Re: Cognates

Postby Linguist » 2015-01-26, 21:22

Johanna wrote:I see. Thanks for the explanation and checking the OP :)

thank you. :)
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Re: Cognates

Postby linguoboy » 2015-01-27, 22:08

Now that we've established borrowings are kosher:

[flag=]en[/flag] stove
[flag=]de[/flag] Stube
[flag=]hu[/flag] szoba
[flag=]sk[/flag] izba

I would not have assumed the Hungarian was borrowed from the German. I'm used to seeing impermissible initial clusters broken up with a prothetic vowel, as in Ibero- or Gallo-Romance (e.g. Strang > istrang).

The Slovak borrowing is even less recognisable, because in addition to prothesis, you also have vowel reduction followed by resyllabification. The reconstructed Proto-Slavic form is *jьstъba, with two jers, and its descendents are all over the map semantically, e.g. [flag=]ru[/flag] изба "peasant house", [flag=]bg[/flag] изба "cellar", [flag=]sh[/flag] izba "closet" (doublet of soba "room", a borrowing from the Hungarian).

You can also see some semantic drift in Germanic. The reconstructed meaning is "heated room" which German generalised to "inhabited room" (i.e. in a house, as opposed to larger enclosed spaces with different uses) whereas English transferred the name to the heating element itself.
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Re: Cognates

Postby Kristjan » 2015-01-27, 22:44

linguoboy wrote:I would not have assumed the Hungarian was borrowed from the German. I'm used to seeing impermissible initial clusters broken up with a prothetic vowel, as in Ibero- or Gallo-Romance (e.g. Strang > istrang).

That was the case in the earlier stages of the Old Hungarian periode (896-1526), but since the Renaissance (beginning in the middle of the 15th century in Hungary) Hungarian gives in to this clusters. Prés, trón, pláne, kvázi, strand, sztráda, platni, zrikál (irritate, tease, annoy).


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