# Similar words of different origin



## HenchardTheGreat

'False friends' are similar words of common origin with different meanings. What is the term for similar words with the same meaning in the same language that have different origins? To make the question more concrete, some examples are - 'isle' and 'island'; 'male' and 'female', etc.


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## kakapadaka

Umm I think you need to rephrase your question. False friends are similar words of *different origin *with *different meanings  *(_signifié_) but similar *form *(_signifiant_), for example the English verb _to_ _vacuum _and Spanish _vacunar _('vaccinate'). They seem similar but they actually have nothing in common.

Your examples are also unclear, because _male _and _female _do have very different meanings and they actually share their origin (Latin). Try again


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## fdb

Male and female come, via French, from Latin masculus and femella respectively. So they are indeed NOT related. In English, however, the spelling of latter has been altered by false analogy to the former.


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## entangledbank

I propose the name 'convergents', if no-one comes up with one already in use, from convergent evolution of forms.


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## kakapadaka

All due respect but this is exactly why Linguistics and Philology is NOT a science even though it very much tries to be. Philologists rush to create theories and nomenclature before they even understand the problem and if there's no problem - they create one. *HenchardTheGreat* who created this thread hasn't even formulated his idea in a clear way, let's allow him to explain before we answer. 'Similar words that have the same meaning' like he put it - that's called _synonyms. _Similar forms with different meanings? That's called _homonyms. _To come up with more useless terms, I'm afraid one needs to have a PhD in Linguistics  (seriously, no offense)


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## rbrunner

kakapadaka said:


> 'Similar words that have the same meaning' like he put it - that's called _synonyms._



Since when are synonyms 'similar', i.e. either written similarly or pronounced similarly?

_Isle_ and _island_ share quite some similarity, and you could readily suspect an etymology of _island_ as _isle_ plus _-land_, but surprisingly that's far from true. Likewise with _male_ and _female_: I find it interesting that it's not simply _fe-_ (with whatever etymology) plus _male_, but a case of two quite distinct etymologies.

I think whether a term for this is useful depends on the number of such examples: I for one can't come up with another English one right now. (I once suspected that German _Geld_ "money" is somehow etymologically connected to _Gold_ "gold" which would make some sense, but these two similar German words also have different etymologies.)


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## kakapadaka

When did he define 'similar' as 'written similarly or pronounced similarly'? Is sharing the meaning not similar enough?


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## Myridon

kakapadaka said:


> When did he define 'similar' as 'written similarly or pronounced similarly'? Is sharing the meaning not similar enough?


When someone says something is A (similar) and B (have the same meaning), we assume that they want some meaning of A other than B, i.e. they are not asking only about B.


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## berndf

HenchardTheGreat said:


> 'False friends' are similar words of common origin with different meanings. What is the term for similar words with the same meaning in the same language that have different origins? To make the question more concrete, some examples are - 'isle' and 'island'; 'male' and 'female', etc.



I think it is indeed necessary that you explain your question a bit more. Isle and island are similar words with the same meaning. Male and female are similar words with opposite meanings. We can't see the commonalities of these examples.


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## hadronic

kakapadaka said:


> False friends are similar words of *different origin *with *different meanings  *(_signifié_) but similar *form *(_signifiant_), for example the English verb _to_ _vacuum _and Spanish _vacunar _('vaccinate'). They seem similar but they actually have nothing in common.



Like OP said, false friends are words of _common origin_ with _different meanings _in two languages. For example, to _attend, eventually, petty _in English vs. _attendre, eventuellement, petit _in French, resp.


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## HenchardTheGreat

Yes, male and female do have opposite meanings, but both are adjectives relating to gender. If someone did not know the etymology, then they would certainly think that female was formed as 'fe'(prefix) + 'male', which is not true.


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## berndf

So you are looking for words which look like related although they in reality they aren't?


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## Walshie79

rbrunner said:


> Since when are synonyms 'similar', i.e. either written similarly or pronounced similarly?
> 
> _Isle_ and _island_ share quite some similarity, and you could readily suspect an etymology of _island_ as _isle_ plus _-land_, but surprisingly that's far from true. Likewise with _male_ and _female_: I find it interesting that it's not simply _fe-_ (with whatever etymology) plus _male_, but a case of two quite distinct etymologies.
> 
> I think whether a term for this is useful depends on the number of such examples: I for one can't come up with another English one right now. (I once suspected that German _Geld_ "money" is somehow etymologically connected to _Gold_ "gold" which would make some sense, but these two similar German words also have different etymologies.)



I think I was in my second year of linguistics at uni when I realised "Geld" was not cognate to English "gold", but "yield". It was such an obvious looking one I never bothered looking it up. Hut= hood, not hat or hut I knew years earlier by contrast.

Male/female is an interesting one because they're still obviously unrelated in French, mâle vs femelle. (Wasn't it even spelt "masle" back when it entered English?). Perhaps English speakers thought "man and woman are related, so these French words for them must be too".


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## Schimmelreiter

berndf said:


> words which look like related although in reality they aren't


_pseudo-cognates
_


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## Delvo

How about this one...

Latin "super" and Greek "huper" (from which we get "hyper") didn't originally have their initial consonant sounds. The PIE root started at the vowel and gave us English "over" and German "über". But in Latin & Greek, they were perceived as belonging as a pair together with "subo" and "hupo" (from which we get "sub" and "hypo"), so the initial consonants got transferred over to their antonyms.


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## fdb

I do not quite follow what you are saying. The Latin s- is secondary both in super and sub (not "subo").


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## Unoverwordinesslogged

The _tern_ (seabird) and the _bit*tern*_ (wadingbird).

Unlike say: *isl*and and *isl*e, wonder if the latter half of words are more wont to give cognate misreadings. 

By the way, English: _townhall _and German: _Tonhalle_ are not cognates yet they are both names of almost always big civic downtown buildings.

_Likewise Lille_ and _Lillehammer_ both towns whilst not cognate. Though beware, _hamm_ can also mean isle/island/surrounded by water or whatever else - if other stuff other than water can maketh an island(?)


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## Delvo

Unoverwordinesslogged said:


> English: _townhall _and German: _Tonhalle_ are not cognates yet they are both names of almost always big civic downtown buildings.


What's the origin of the German one?


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## Schimmelreiter

cognates:
_tone/Ton  _(Tonhalle: concert hall)
_town/Zaun  _​(Zaun: fence)


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## Cenzontle

In this discussion you may find the technical term "folk etymology" useful.
This is not—as it might seem—what naive folks tell you when you ask them where they think a word came from,
but rather the alteration of an unfamiliar word to be like a familiar one.
Classic examples include "asparagus" being renamed "sparrow grass" in some varieties of English,
or French "écrevisse" becoming English "crayfish"—based on the sound of the word and the creature's watery habitat, in spite of looking nothing like a fish.
To return to Henchard's example, we might say that "female" involves some folk etymology.
French _femelle _"should" not have given the sound of "...male"; but the association with its antonym "contaminated" its pronunciation.
As a child I had a hard time learning to spell (and pronounce) "sacrilegious" (< Lat. sacer + legere),
because it seemed to be "religious" with a prefix "sac-".
I suspect that if you listen to children trying to make sense of the language around them, you will hear more folk etymologies like this one.


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## Unoverwordinesslogged

Cenzontle said:


> In this discussion you may find the technical term "folk etymology" useful.
> This is not—as it might seem—what naive folks tell you when you ask them where they think a word came from,
> but rather the alteration of an unfamiliar word to be like a familiar one.
> *Classic examples include "asparagus" being renamed "sparrow grass" in some varieties of English,
> or French "écrevisse" becoming English "crayfish"—based on the sound of the word and the creature's watery habitat, in spite of looking nothing like a fish.*
> To return to Henchard's example, we might say that "female" involves some folk etymology.
> French _femelle _"should" not have given the sound of "...male"; but the association with its antonym "contaminated" its pronunciation.
> As a child I had a hard time learning to spell (and pronounce) "sacrilegious" (< Lat. sacer + legere),
> because it seemed to be "religious" with a prefix "sac-".
> I suspect that if you listen to children trying to make sense of the language around them, you will hear more folk etymologies like this one.



You are asidely undoing yourself by 'folk etymologising' your examples of folk etymology. 

It became to be thought has: _*cray*fish_ because in Britain these shellfish/crabfish were first happened upon in _crays_ which is an older English word ford stream. Note placenames such as: _Footscray, Crayford, Cray, Craymere Beck and so forth, and Kray_ in Germany. 

Anyway, the folk got it right, the: _-visse_ in: _écrevisse_ does indeed mean fish like the Dutch: _vis_ - further weakening its folketymologiness.


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## berndf

Unoverwordinesslogged said:


> You are asidely undoing yourself by 'folk etymologising' your examples of folk etymology.
> 
> It became to be thought has: _*cray*fish_ because in Britain these shellfish/crabfish were first happened upon in _crays_ which is an older English word ford stream. Note placenames such as: _Footscray, Crayford, Cray, Craymere Beck and so forth, and Kray_ in Germany.
> 
> Anyway, the folk got it right, the: _-visse_ in: _écrevisse_ does indeed mean fish like the Dutch: _vis_ - further weakening its folketymologiness.


That is all quite irrelevant. 1) Crayfish is indeed from French and nothing else and 2) the Frankish root of écrevisse has almost certainly nothing to do with vis. A crab is not a vis. Fish are vertebrats. The extension of fish to other animals living unter water is an English peculiarity that hasn't happened in any other Germanic language.


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## Unoverwordinesslogged

Schimmelreiter said:


> cognates:
> _tone/Ton  _(Tonhalle: concert hall)
> _town/Zaun  _​(Zaun: fence)



The cognate of German Tonhalle is (I believe) something like _*din*/Ton_ not _*tone*/Ton._ 



> din (n.)
> 
> Old English *dyne* (n.), dynian (v.), from Proto-Germanic *duniz (cognates: Old Norse dynr, Danish don, Middle Low German *don* "noise"), from PIE root *dwen- "to make noise" (cognates: Sanskrit dhuni "roaring, a torrent").


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## berndf

You believe wrongly. A Tonhalle is a concert hall (a hall where tones are produced).


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## fdb

berndf said:


> The extension of fish to other animals living unter water is an English peculiarity that hasn't happened in any other Germanic language.



though there is Walfisch (whale)....


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## rbrunner

fdb said:


> though there is Walfisch (whale)....



and there is _Tintenfisch_ "squid" which at least to me isn't very fish-like.


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## luitzen

The interesting thing is that the s in island is there due to association with isle.

To me it has always been obvious that German Geld, Dutch geld and English yield are related. The West-Frisian word for money is jild.

Some other examples:
German - Dutch - English - West Frisian
Garen - garen - yarn - jern
gelb - geel - yellow - giel
Tag - dag - day - dei
Wagen - wagen - wain (wagon is borrowed from Dutch) - wein
gießen - gieten - pour - jitte
fergessen - vergeten - forget - forjitte

But:
Gold - goud - gold - goud
It's all starting with g.

There are so many words where Dutch or German has g, Frisian has j. Even kids realise that English words with y are related to Dutch/German words with g.


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## berndf

fdb said:


> though there is Walfisch (whale)....


That is more of a biological misclassification than a linguistic extension.



rbrunner said:


> and there is _Tintenfisch_ "squid" which at least to me isn't very fish-like.


One could dismiss this as a misnomer but looking up the history of the usage of _Fisch _in Grimm's shows that there are indeed some attestations of _Fisch=animal living in water_ also in German. But contrary to Old, Middle and Early Modern English, this extension is extremely rare in German whereas in these development stages of English it was the regular meaning of _fish _(the MED shows it as the primary meaning).


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## Scholiast

Greetings



> The interesting thing is that the s in island is there due to association with isle


Really? isn't it because of derivation of both words (via Norman French) from Latin _insula_?

Σ


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## berndf

Scholiast said:


> Greetings
> 
> 
> Really? isn't it because of derivation of both words (via Norman French) from Latin _insula_?
> 
> Σ


No _island _is cognate to German _Eiland _which in turn has nothing to do with an _egg _(German _Ei_) but is a lost old Germanic word (OE _ea_) cognate to Latin _aqua_. So, _island/Eiland_ means _land in the water_.


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## luitzen

Island literally means water land. The i is cognate to Frisian ie and Dutch aa/ee. There are some rivers in the Netherlands that are called like this. Even though people wouldn't associate the word with water(way) or river anymore, it's still used in some name's and is quite prevalent in the north of the Netherlands. Names of canals that come to mind are Dokkumer Ie and Suderie in Frisia and in Drenthe there's a municipalty called Aa en Hunze and there's even a river in northern France called Aa.

island in other languages:
Dutch: eiland
West-Frisian: eilân
German: Eiland
Mooring North-Frisian: ailönj
Föhr/Amrum North-Frisian: eilun
Norwegian: øy
Swedish: ö
Swedish: Åland (independent region in Finland)
Low German: Ailand
Saterland Frisian: Ailound
Danish: øland

And according to Wiktionary, some English dialects have the word ea, which is probably pronounced more or less the same as West-Frisian ie: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ea#English


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## Cenzontle

Back to crayfish (alias "crawfish"), here is what the _OED _says—with "[...]" for my abridgments:


> Middle English _crevice_ , _-visse_ , < Old French _crevice_ [...] < Old High German _crebiȥ_ Middle High German _krebeȥ_ , a derivative of stem _*kraƀ-_ in _krab-bo_ crab _n.1_ q.v.
> In Southern Middle English the second syllable was naturally confounded with _vish_ [...], ‘fish’; [...] and the later _crey-_, _cray-fish_. The variants in _cra-_ go back to Anglo-Norman when the stress was still on second syllable, and the first liable to vary between _cre-_and _cra-_; they are the origin of the modern _craw-fish_, now used chiefly in U.S.


Meanwhile, speaking of "isle", with its etymological (albeit silent) "s" (Lat. _insula_),
that word has folk-etymologically contaminated the spelling of its homonym, "aisle" (from Middle French "aile", and that from Latin "ala"—none of which had "s").
Similarly the Germanic "light", "night", "sight" etc. contaminated the spelling of "delight" (< OF "delitier" < Lat. "delectare"—verbs).


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## berndf

Or _plight _which is a conflation of an inherited Germanic ME noun, _pliȝt = duty, peril_, and a ME noun of Romance origin, _plit = condition_.


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## Scholiast

Greetings once more

[and incidentally with thanks to berndf for correcting, #30, my misapprehension about "island"/_insula_ ]



> ...a ME noun of Romance origin, _plit = condition_



*Moderator note: Off-topic question moved here.*

Σ


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