False cognate - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org

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

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
    10·
    2 months ago

    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

    Common but old origin tends to make words diverge over time. Compare for example:

    Old languages Modern languages
    Proto-Germanic */fimf/ English ⟨five⟩ /'fa͡ɪv/
    Latin ⟨quinque⟩ /'kʷin.kʷe/ Italian ⟨cinque⟩ /'t͡ʃin.kʷe/
    Proto-Celtic */'kʷen.kʷe/ Irish ⟨cúig⟩ /'ku:ɟ/
    Sanskrit ⟨पञ्चन्⟩ /'pɐɲ.t͡ɕɐn/ Hindi ⟨पाँच⟩ /'pɑ̃:t͡ʃ/

    All those eight are true cognates, they’re all from Proto-Indo-European *pénkʷe. But if you look only at the modern stuff, those four look nothing like each other - and yet their [near-]ancestors (the other four) resemble each other a bit better, Latin and Proto-Celtic for example used almost the same word.

    They also get even more similar if you know a few common sound changes, like:

    • Proto-Italic (Latin’s ancestor) changed PIE *p into /kʷ/ if there was another /kʷ/ nearby
    • Proto-Germanic changed PIE *p into *f (Grimm’s Law)

    In the meantime, false cognates - like the ones mentioned by the OP - are often similar now, but once you dig into their past they look less and less like each other, the opposite of the above.

    They also often rely on affixes that we know to be unrelated. For example, let’s dig a bit into the first pair, desert/deshret:

    • Latin ⟨deserō⟩ “I desert, I abandon [unseeded], I part away” - that de- is always found in verbs with movement from something, or undoing something. It’s roughly like English “away” in trennbare phrasal verbs like ⟨part away⟩, ⟨explain away⟩, ⟨go away⟩
    • Egyptian ⟨dšrt⟩* “the red” - the ending -t is a feminine ending, like Spanish -a. And the word isn’t even ⟨deshret⟩ in Egyptian, it’s more like /ˈtʼaʃɾat/

    Suddenly our comparison isn’t even between ⟨desert⟩ and ⟨deshret⟩, but rather between /seɾo:/ and /ˈtʼaʃɾa/. They… don’t look similar at all.

    * see here for the word in hieroglyphs.

    Other bits of info:

    • ⟨shark⟩ - potentially a borrowing from German ⟨Schurke⟩ scoundrel. Think on loan sharks, for example, those people who chase you over and over; apply the same meaning to a fish and you got a predator, a shark fish. Note that the old name of the fish (dogfish) also hints the same behaviour.
    • Turkish ⟨kayık⟩ - the word is attested as ⟨qayğıq⟩ in Khaqani Turkic. I might be wrong but I think that the -yık (Old Turkic “guk”) forms adjectives, as the Azeri cognates that I’ve found using this suffix are mostly adjectives; see qıyıq, ayıq, sayıq. Kind of tempting to interpret it etymologically as something like “sliding boat”, with the “boat” part being eventually omitted.
    • Otter@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      Very cool, thank you for the detailed breakdown that was helpful!

    • RamblingPanda@lemmynsfw.com
      2·
      2 months ago

      I think it went over my head after the third paragraph but I’m deeply fascinated and impressed. I’ll act like I understood everything to look smart though. Thank you 💕

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
        3·
        2 months ago

        Sorry! I have a tendency to shift to technical vocab midtext, so it’s likely my fault.

        I’ll use the comment to clarify some terms:

        • Proto-Germanic: the ancestor of English, German, Icelandic, Gothic, etc. Spoken from 500 BCE to 200 CE.
        • Proto-Celtic: the ancestor of Irish, Welsh, Gaulish, etc. Spoken from 1300 BCE to 800 BCE.
        • Proto-Italic: the ancestor of Latin, Umbrian, Faliscan etc. Spoken around 1000 BCE. (Since it’s Latin’s ancestor it’s also the ancestor of every Romance language, kind of like their grandmother.)
        • Sanskrit: one of “the big five” languages of the Old World, spoken in Indian subcontinent. Attested as early as 1500 BCE. Not quite Hindi’s ancestor, but close enough.
        • Proto-Indo-European: ancestor of all languages that I mentioned above. And a lot more.
        • If it’s written ⟨like this⟩, I’m referring to the spelling. If it’s written /laɪk ðɪs/, I’m referring to the phonemes (basic units of the spoken language). The symbols used are IPA, for a full list check this. 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.
        • Cognate: a word with a true common origin. Basically they used to be the same word but time happened and each language got its own version of the word.
        • Affix - something that you plop into a word to make a new word. For example the un- and the -ing in ⟨undoing⟩ are two affixes.
        • Trennbare verb - I wrote it half asleep and couldn’t remember the English term for this sort of verb. It’s “phrasal verb” (a verb where the preposition is part of the verb). Gonna fix it. Latin used something similar, but instead of letting the preposition roam free as in English/German it glued the preposition to the word, the de- in ⟨desertum⟩ is an example of that.
        • feminine ending - in the case of Egyptian it’s a suffix (-t) that appears in a few words, like that “dšrt”. In this case it’s mostly for grammatical purposes, and not plopping it makes you sound like “then who was phone?”, but in Egyptian instead.

        If anything else is unclear feel free to ask away!

        • RamblingPanda@lemmynsfw.com
          2·
          2 months 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 💖