To clarify, have there ever been instances of words in two completely different languages sounding the same for the same thing? The languages have to have seperate origins, and assume no previous contact between cultures.
Tagalog’s word for toothpaste is Colgate, but only because they took the word from Westerners who introduced toothpaste. So that doesn’t count. Nor do Romance languages sharing Latin roots.
Was a cat pronouced (roughly) “cat” in Arabic, “cat” in Chinese, “cat” in Lakota, etc.
Just re-read Hitchhiker’s Guide and got the idea from every planet calling a Gin & Tonic a “Gin & Tonic” before meeting other planets.
Yes, they are called False Cognates, although they don’t have to be identical to be labeled such. Here are the English examples from that wikipedia article:
This one is interesting as “laser” in English is not a word but an acronym for a device- Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. I wonder if the Gaelic “lasair” was just a word they made up for a “laser,” or if “lasair” has always mean “light beam” or “flame” in Gaelic, which I would find kind of coincidentally cool.
I don’t know how true it is, but I’ve heard that in every known language, the word for “mother” has the “m” sound as either the first consonant or as the main consonant. (It does happen to be true for several languanges that I’m somewhat familiar with.)
If true, it supposedly points to independent origins of similar words (as requested by the OP) resulting from a sound very frequently and easily made by babies.
Not to be confused with “false friends”, faux amis where the word sounds the same as something in English but means something different. Demander, ignorer, rester, quitter, embarazada. Although this page refers to those examples as false cognates as well, even though they don’t mean the same thing like the ones listed above, so I am confused.
Como in Spanish and k’mo in Hebrew both mean “like” (in the sense of resembling). There’s also a verb that means the same thing and sounds similar in those two languages… it’ll come to me.
My favourite pair is “gaijin” (Japanese) and “goyim” (Hebrew) if only because this pair was allegedly once used to suggest that all world languages were related. Bit of a stretch if you ask me…
They may not mean exactly the same thing, but they have somewhat similar meanings (at least) and the same origin. For instance, you can demander that someone do something, which means you ask them to do it. Not the same as demanding, but it’s not a huge change in meaning. My dictionary says you can ignorer (ignore) someone, so I’d say that word has exactly the same meaning. Rester means stay, not the same as rest but pretty close. I may be mistaken, but I think you can quitter (quit) a job meaning it’s at least sometimes the same. I have no idea what embarazada means and neither does my dictionary. (It knows what embarraser means and that’s obviously a cognate.) So except for that last one, I’d say they’re similar enough in meaning to be cognates.
No, they are independent of each other. English “so” derives from the Anglo-Saxon. As for Japanese “so”, well I don’t know, but it predates any contact with English speakers and fits well into a pattern familiar to anyone who knows Japanese grammar:
kore = this; sore; that (nearby); are = that (far away)
koko = here; soko = there (nearby); asoko = there (far away)
kochira = here; sochira = there (nearby); achira = there (far away)
ko = like this; so = like that (nearby); aa = like that (far away)
etc., etc. Some coincidences are just coincidences, nothing more.
Mama is used by toddlers also. What’s interesting is that back in classical times (Heian period c.800 CE), the word for mother was pronounced not haha but papa, which later shifted to fafa and finally to it’s current form.
Off the top of my head, Japanese has also the following pairs: Miru (to look) -> Mirar in Spanish. Arigatou (thank you) -> Obrigado in Poruguese. Shikaru (to scold) -> Chicaner in Canadian French. (Meaning is different in France.)
It’s not that every language has the word for mother begin with “m”, but that almost every Indo-European language does. Which makes the question for this OP: “Do your rules consider relatedness of languages that far back?” It’s one thing to say that Romance-descendant cognates don’t count, but an entirely different thing to say that Indo-European-descendant cognates don’t count.
I think the OP meant no known relationship at all. But I also heard that “mama” or “ma” is commonly seen in many unrelated languages in association with the word “mother”.
Joseph Greenberg was probably the most credible linguist who tried to argue that it was possible to link all the languages in the world. His universal marker was the root tik. His contention is that almost every language has some form of this root that pops up in words related to “digit”, “finger”, or “one”, or something very similar. So if you were looking for a universal true cognate, that would be it (but keep in mind that Greenberg’s hypothesis is very controversial).