False cognate

False cognates are pairs 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 unrelated. This is different from a false friend, which two words may have similar roots but have diverged in meaning.

Even though false cognates lack a common root, there may still be an indirect connection between them (for example through phono-semantic matching or folk etymology), and in any case they can be helpful (if only as mnemonics) in learning another language.

Phenomenon

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 (起こる).

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).

A related phenomenon is the expressive loan, which looks like a native construction, but is not.

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 have 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 such as that of monogenesis, some of these examples would indeed be distantly related cognates, but the evidence for reclassifying them as such is insufficient. (Alternatively, apparent cognates in Eurasian language families far removed from each other could also be early loanwords, compare Wanderwort.) The Nostratic hypothesis is however based on the comparative method, unlike some other superfamily hypotheses.

"Mama and papa" type

The basic kinship terms mama and papa (together with the wider class of Lallnamen) comprise a special case of false cognates. 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 and to employ them subsequently as part of their baby-talk lexicon. 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 easy to produce (nasals like m or n, typically for "mother" words, or plosives like p/b and t/d, typically for "father" words, along with the basic vowel a). However, variants do occur; for example, in Old Japanese, the word for "mother" was papa, and in Slavic languages, baba is a common nickname for "grandmother", as in Baba Yaga and babushka. In Georgian, the usual pattern (nasal for "mother", plosive for "father") is inverted: the word for "father" is mama and the word for "mother" is deda.

Examples

Within English

• amenable and amenity
• island and isle
• loon and lunatic
• male and female, which come from the Latin masculinus and femella, respectively.
• man and human
• pen and pencil
• pusillanimous (cowardly, from Latin meaning "tiny-spirited") and pussy
• trawl (to fish by dragging a net) and troll (to fish by trailing a line, or to provoke someone on purpose)
• villain and vile

Across languages

See also

• False friend
• Phono-semantic matching
• Translation
• Folk etymology
• False etymology
• Semantic change
• Etymological fallacy

Notes

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.

External links

Look up false cognate in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• A list of false cognates
• Of false friends and deceptive cognates
• What's the difference between a “false cognate” and a “false friend”?