False cognate

Categories: Historical linguistics

A pair of false cognates consists of two words in different languages that appear to be or are sometimes considered cognates (words in different languages with a common root) when they are in fact not. Note that even false cognates may have an indirect connection between them, even if they lack a common root.

For example, 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 guduga). Similarly, the Korean word manhi (an adverb meaning "plentifully") resembles the English "many" and 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, Farsi baba, and French papa (all "dad"); or Navajo má, Chinese māma, Swahili mama and English "mum/mom"). 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). See Mama and papa for more information.

The term "false cognate" is sometimes misused to describe a false friend. The difference between a false cognate and a false friend is that while a false cognate means roughly the same thing in two languages, a false friend is completely unrelated, and may even, purely by chance, mean the opposite.

Even though not real or false cognates, the Japanese words iie ("no") and hai ("yes") are similar to the respective words in Estonian, except they are backwards (with the i in hai becoming a j); i.e. in Estonian they are ei ("no") and jah ("yes").

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

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Examples

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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.
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