False cognates are a pair of words in the same or different languages that are similar in form and meaning but have different roots. That is, they appear to be or are sometimes considered cognates when in fact they are not. Note that even false cognates may have an indirect connection between them, even if they lack a common root. Look up False friend in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The root is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. ... Look up cognate in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

As an example of false cognates, the word for "dog" in the Australian Aboriginal language Mbabaram happens to be dog, although there is no common ancestor or other connection between that language and English (the Mbabaram word evolved regularly from a protolinguistic form *gudaga). Similarly, in the Japanese language the word 'to occur' happens to be okoru. Sometimes, words merge, e.g. Finnish piikki seems like a cognate to spike, but when it has the meaning "cusp of a graph", the cognate is peak. The Australian Aboriginal languages comprise several language families and isolates native to Australia and a few nearby islands, but by convention excluding Tasmania. ... Mbabaram is an Australian Aboriginal language, now extinct. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Not to be confused with the Javanese language. ... Cusp may refer to any of the following: In common parlance, a cusp is an important moment usually regarded as a decision point upon which consequent events are determined. ...

The basic kinship terms mama and papa comprise a special case of false cognates (cf. !Kung ba, Chinese bàba, Persian baba, and French papa (all "dad"); or Navajo má, Chinese māma, Swahili mama, Quechua mama, and English "mama"). The striking cross-linguistical similarities between these terms are thought to result from the nature of language acquisition (Jakobson 1962). According to Jakobson, these words are the first word-like sounds made by babbling babies; and parents tend to associate the first sound babies make with themselves. 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 easiest to produce (bilabial stops like m and b and the basic vowel a). However, variants do occur; for example, in Fijian, the word for "mother" is nana, and in Old Japanese, the word for "mother" was papa (the modern word haha "mother" is the descendant of the older word). Furthermore, the modern Japanese word for "father," chichi, is from older titi. In fact, in Japanese the child's initial mamma is interpreted to mean "food". In linguistics, mama and papa refers to the sequences of sounds , and similar ones are known to correspond to the word for mother and father in many languages of the world, often completely unrelated among themselves. ... Xu may refer to any one of several southern African Khoisan languages: Kung-ekoka language Kxoe language This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... Farsi redirects here. ... Reading Adahooniigii — The Navajo Language Monthly Navajo or Navaho (native name: Diné bizaad) is an Athabaskan language (of Na-Dené stock) spoken in the southwest United States by the Navajo people (Diné). It is geographically and linguistically one of the Southern Athabaskan languages (the majority of Athabaskan languages are spoken... This article is about the language. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Quechuan languages. ... Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics Language acquisition is the process by which the language capability develops in a human. ... Roman Osipovich Jakobson (October 11, 1896 - July 18, 1982) was a Russian thinker who became one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century by pioneering the development of structural analysis of language, poetry, and art. ... Labials are consonants articulated either with both lips (bilabial articulation) or with the lower lip and the upper teeth (labiodental articulation). ... A stop, plosive, or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. ... Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... The Old Japanese language is the Japanese language as used in the Kojiki, Manyoshu, Nihonshoki, and other early records of Japanese history and poetry. ...

The term "false cognate" is sometimes misused to describe false friends. One difference between false cognates and false friends is that while false cognates mean roughly the same thing in two languages, false friends bear two distinct (sometimes even opposite) meanings. In fact, a pair of false friends may be true cognates (see false friends: causes). Look up False friend in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up False friend in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

The opposite of a false cognate is an expressive loan, which looks like a native construction, but is not. An expressive loan is a loanword incorporated into the expressive system of the borrowing language, making it resemble native words or onomatopoeia. ...

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've 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, some of these examples would indeed be distantly related cognates, but the evidence for reclassifying them as such is insufficient. The Nostratic hypothesis is however based on the comparative method, unlike some other superfamily hypotheses. The origin of language (glottogony) is a topic that has attracted considerable speculation throughout human history. ... The Nostratic languages are a proposed language superfamily to which some linguists believe a large number of language families from Europe, Asia, and Africa possibly belong. ... The comparative method (in comparative linguistics) is a technique used by linguists to demonstrate genetic relationships between languages. ...

Examples

• Arabic/Hebrew akh (brother) and Mongolian akh (brother)
• Arabic ana (I) and Gondi ana (I)
• Arabic anta (you, masculine singular) and Japanese anata / anta (you, singular)
• Arabic ard (earth) and Dutch aard (earth)
• Arabic sharif and English sheriff
• Bangla fela (Throw Away/Put down) and English fell (to make something fall)
• Bangla kaata (To cut) and English cut (to sever)
• Bikol aki (child) and Korean agi (child)
• Blackfoot aki (woman) and Even akhi (woman)
• English dork and Russian durak
• Coptic per (house) and Etruscan pera (house)
• Egyptian kns (vagina) and Latin cunnus (vagina)
• Egyptian *maRaR (to see, to look), Japanese miru (to look), and Spanish mirar (to look for, to watch)
• English "among" and Bisayan "among" (accidentally included)
• English am (first person present tense of to be), Etruscan am (to be), and Sumerian am (to be)
• English and and Indonesian dan
• English bad and Farsi bad
• English boy and Japanese bōya (young male child)
• English bullshit and Mandarin búshì (不是; isn't, not true)
• English can and Japanese kan (cylindrical metal container)
• English cheek and Russian scheka (щека; cheek)
• English chop and Uzbek chop
• English dairy and Russian doyar (дояр; milker), doyarka (milkmaid)
• English day, daily and Spanish día (day) (or Latin dies (day) or even English diary)^[1]
• English delete and Russian udalit' (удалить; to delete, remove)
• English dog and Mbabaram dog
• English dung and Korean 똥 ttong (excrement)
• English earth and Hebrew erets (land)
• English egg and Luganda eggi
• English evaporate and Russian ispar'at' (испарять);
• English house and Hungarian ház (house, block of flats) (the Hungarian word has corresponding counterparts in other Uralic languages)
• English hut and Russian hata (хата)
• English island and isle
• English it, Russian eto(это) and Tagalog eto/ito (it, this)
• English king and Altaic khan
• English laser and Scottish Gaelic lasair (light beam, flame)
• English mount (short form of "mountain"), and Hawaiian mauna (mountain)
• English much and Spanish mucho
• English pan and Mandarin pan (pan, shallow plate)
• English pen and pencil
• English pear and Korean 배 pay, bae (Korean pear)
• English persecution and Russian presechenie (persecution, suppression, injunction)
• English reason and Russian razum
• English seed and Korean 씨 ssi (pip)
• English stone and Mandarin shítou (traditional 石頭, simplified 石头)
• English strange and Russian stranno(странно)
• English stranger and Russian strannik(странник)
• English trawl (to fish by dragging a net) and English troll (to fish by trailing a line)
• English vagina, and Hawaiian/Maori wahine (woman)
• English viscosity and Russian v'azkost'
• English why and Korean 왜 wae (what for)
• Estonian/Finnish ei (no, not), Etruscan ei (no, not), and Swedish ej (not)
• Estonian mina/Finnish minä (I), and Zulu mina (I)
• Estonian ta (short form of tema) (he/she) and Mandarin tā (他) (he/she)
• Etruscan ac (to make, act) and Sumerian ak (to make,act)
• Etruscan an (he/she/it) and Sumerian ane (he/she/it)
• Etruscan ipa (who, which) and Sumerian aba (who)
• Etruscan mi (I/me) and Sumerian ma (I/me) and Korean na (I)
• Finnish ja (and) and Japanese ya (and)
• Finnish sinä (singular you) and Turkish sen (singular you)
• French le (the) and Samoan le (the)
• Ga ba (come) and Hebrew ba (come)
• German Ach, so! and Japanese A‘, soo (I see)
• German haben (to have) and Latin habere (to have)
• German Kreuz (cross) and Russian krest (крест; cross)
• Greek thesato and Russian sosat' (сосать; to suck)
• Greek theos and Latin Deus (God)
• Greek root -lab- and Sanskrit root -labh- (take)
• Hawaiian kahuna (priest) and Hebrew kehunah (priesthood)
• Hebrew ari (lion) and Tamil ari (lion)
• Hebrew dereh (road) and Russian doroga (дорога; road)
• Hebrew shesh (six) and Persian shesh (six)
• Indonesian dua (two) and Pashto dwa (two) and Korean dul (two)
• Inuit kayak and Turkish kayik and Choco language group cayuca (rowing boat)
• Japanese arigato and Portuguese obrigado (thank you)
• Japanese babā (disrespectful term meaning "old hag") and Russian baba (grandmother)
• Japanese kokoro and Esperanto koro (heart)
• Japanese pan (bread) and Spanish pan (bread)
• Kyrgyz ayal (woman) and Parji ayal (woman)
• Luganda na ('and') and Dutch en (and)
• Russian sok (сок; juice) and Latin succus (juice)
• Spanish vale (sure, yes) and Persian baleh" (yes)

Arabic can mean: From or related to Arabia From or related to the Arabs The Arabic language; see also Arabic grammar The Arabic alphabet, used for expressing the languages of Arabic, Persian, Malay ( Jawi), Kurdish, Panjabi, Pashto, Sindhi and Urdu, among others. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Sayyid. ... Look up Sheriff in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Farsi may refer to: The name of the the Persian language among native speakers Farsi Island, an Iranian island in the Persian Gulf The Jafari Shia Tajiks of Central Asia Salman al-Farsi, one of the prophet Muhammads companions Al-Farisi (1260-1320), Persian mathematician and physicist Jalaleddin Farsi... “Hebrew” redirects here. ... Luganda is a Bantu language and is spoken mainly in Uganda by the people of Buganda. ... Geographical distribution of Samoyedic, Finnic, Ugric and Yukaghir languages  Yukaghir  Samoyedic  Ugric  Finnic The Uralic languages (pronounced: ) form a language family of about 30 languages spoken by approximately 20 million people. ... Altaic is a proposed language family that includes 66 languages [1] spoken by about 348 million people, mostly in and around Central Asia and northeast Asia. ... The Yale romanizations are four systems created during World War II for use by United States military personnel. ... The Revised Romanization of Korean is the official Korean language romanization system in South Korea. ... It has been suggested that Asian pear be merged into this article or section. ... Traditional Chinese (Traditional Chinese: 正體字/繁體字, Simplified Chinese: 正体字/繁体字) refers to one of two standard sets of printed Chinese characters. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Look up kayak in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The Choco languages are a small family of Native American languages spread across Colombia and Panama. ...

References

• Jakobson, R. (1962) ‘Why “mama” and “papa”?’ In Jakobson, R. Selected Writings, Vol. I: Phonological Studies, pp. 538–545. The Hague: Mouton.

• Geoff Parkes and Alan Cornell (1992), 'NTC's Dictionary of German False Cognates', National Textbook Company, NTC Publishing Group.

The Oxford English Dictionary print set The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a dictionary published by the Oxford University Press (OUP), and is the most successful dictionary of the English language, (not to be confused with the one-volume Oxford Dictionary of English, formerly New Oxford Dictionary of English, of...

External links

Look up false cognate in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• A list of false cognates