False cognate

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The term "false cognate" is sometimes used incorrectly for false friend.

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.

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 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.

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).

The opposite of a false cognate is an expressive loan, which looks like a native construction, but is not.

Linguists widely presume that all languages go back to a single common ancestor. Therefore, a pair of words whose earlier forms, as far back as they've been traced, are distinct but still similar could in theory have come from a common root in an even earlier language, in which case they would be real cognates. The further back in time language reconstruction efforts go, however, the less confidence there can be in the outcome of the analysis. Attempts at such reconstructions typically rely on just such false cognates, but the connections proposed by these theories tend to be highly conjectural, failing to reflect realistic underlying 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.

[edit] Examples

[edit] 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.

[edit] External links

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