For instance, there are the words discus, desk, dais, dish, and disk which are all ultimately derived from the Greek word discos.
interesting - thx for that …
then it is even more obscure … the french perruque … and the german “macher” (maker)
Thanks Wendell. The “guardian”/“warden” example is particularly interesting to me because English got two words with the same meaning, from two different versions of French and the same with wily and guile (in both cases the one English got first “feels” less fancy.
A long list of Western/European languages use the same word for crocodile, with minor variations:
Dutch and many eastern European: krokodil
German: Krokodil
Polish: krokodyl
Russian and other Cyrillic languages: крокодил
Yiddish: קראָקאָדיל
Samoan: korokotaila
etc.
And, as everyone here on the Dope well knows, the universal (Western at least) word for hummingbird: colibri, kolibri, kolibrie, koolibri, колибри, etc.
In Yiddish, it’s הוממינגבירד
The same “g” / “w” difference shows up in “guarantee” and “warranty”, both borrowed from French. You can also see the “gu” / “w” difference between “Guillaume” and “William”.
There’s lots of words like that. Almost any word for something that has a single source will be the same in numerous languages. I once tried to find the word spelled the same in the most languages. I gave up when I realized the available bilingual dictionaries were too varied in quality. A lot of relatively recent words were not in them.
This was before online translators, but those are even worse. If the translation software doesn’t have a word in it, they usually pass it through without change. Which means you can’t tell if the word is spelled the same in the target language or it’s just passed through.
Anyway, the word spelled the same in the most languages is probably internet, although it may not have been back then*. However, in the last couple years, that’s likely been eclipsed by an even more common word that’s spelled the same even in some languages that don’t use an alphabet.
*This was in the early 90s and virtually none of the bilingual dictionaires had it then.
Yes, but in Spanish it is cocodrilo. It always gets me confused how the “R” wanders around. In a similar vein:
Spanish: Argelia, capital city Argel
German: Algerien, capital city Algier
English: Algeria, capital city Algiers
French: Algérie, capital city Alger
Italian: Italian: Algeria, capital city Algeri
Dutch: Algerije, capital city Algiers
Why do Spanish "r"s wander around like that and even swap places with "l"s? Drives me nuts.
The French are peculiar with information technology terms: the World Wide Web is la toile d’aragnée mondiale (literally the world wide spider web), a program is a logiciel, that is, a set of logical instructions, byte is a multiplet or octet (8-bit byte), among many other peculiarities designed to make interpreters and translators go berserk.
All this reminds me of a short piece by Poul Anderson called Uncleftish Beholding.
It shows what English in an alternate universe might look like without influences from Latin, Greek, French, etc.
uncleft = atom
beholding = theory
Uncleftish Beholding
For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.
The underlying kinds of stuff are the firststuffs, which link together in sundry ways to give rise to the rest. Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. Now we have made more, such as aegirstuff and helstuff.
The firststuffs have their being as motes called unclefts. These are mightly small; one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts.
The full text is 2 pages long, and available here.
Yes, but “internet” seems to be spelled the same in French as it is in English, although it doesn’t seem to require an article. At least “on the internet” translates as “sur internet” according to a couple online translation dictionaries. Unless those dictionaries still don’t have that word, which would be really surprising.
And also available here
I’d heard that the Russian word for railway station, вокзал, originated from the early railway station in London, Vauxhall, which was one of the first stations seen by a visiting Russian delegation in the early Victorian era.
However this BBC link suggests that the name actually came indirectly from the Vauxhall pleasure gardens, an even earlier loan term.
Oops, sorry! Missed that.
No problem.
Not one of these words is a cognate. They are all loan words.
Italian too? There, it’s coccodrillo
Could be worse. Could be like the “r” in “colonel”.
Senegoid, Northern_Piper: Indeed!
See my post above from March 13, especially:
" b of a word or morpheme : related by derivation, borrowing…"
I’m taking “loan” and “borrowing” to refer to the same mechanism. Isn’t that right?
When talking about word derivations, a word can be either cognate with a word from another language, or it can be a loan word from that other language. These are two constrastive processes. They are not synonyms for each other.