False cognate
Encyclopedia
False cognates are pairs of words in the same or different language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...

s that are similar in form and meaning but have different roots. That is, they appear to be, or are sometimes considered, cognate
Cognate
In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common etymological origin. This learned term derives from the Latin cognatus . Cognates within the same language are called doublets. Strictly speaking, loanwords from another language are usually not meant by the term, e.g...

s, when in fact they are not.

Even if false cognates lack a common root, there may still be an indirect connection between them.

Phenomenon

As an example of false cognates, the word for "dog" in the Australian Aboriginal language
Australian Aboriginal languages
The Australian Aboriginal languages comprise several language families and isolates native to the Australian Aborigines of Australia and a few nearby islands, but by convention excluding the languages of Tasmania and the Torres Strait Islanders...

 Mbabaram
Mbabaram language
Mbabaram is an extinct Australian Aboriginal language of north Queensland. It was the traditional language of the Mbabaram tribe. Known speakers were Albert Bennett, Alick Chalk, Jimmy Taylor and Mick Burns. Recordings of Bennett and Chalk are held in the Audiovisual Archive of the Australian...

 happens to be dog, although there is no common ancestor or other connection between that language and English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 (the Mbabaram word evolved regularly from a protolinguistic form *gudaga). Similarly, in the Japanese language
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

 the word 'to occur' happens to be okoru (起こる).

The term "false cognate" is sometimes misused to describe false friend
False friend
False friends are pairs of words or phrases in two languages or dialects that look or sound similar, but differ in meaning....

s. One difference between false cognates and false friends is that while false cognates mean roughly the same thing in two languages, false friends bear two distinct (sometimes even opposite) meanings. In fact, a pair of false friends may be true cognates (see false friends: causes).

A related phenomenon is the expressive loan
Expressive loan
An expressive loan is a loanword incorporated into the expressive system of the borrowing language, making it resemble native words or onomatopoeia. Expressive loanwords are hard to identify, and by definition, they follow the common phonetic sound change patterns poorly. Likewise, there is a...

, which looks like a native construction, but is not.

Some historical linguists presume that all languages go back to a single common ancestor. Therefore, a pair of words whose earlier forms are distinct, yet similar, as far back as they have been traced, could in theory have come from a common root in an even earlier language, making them real cognates. The further back in time language reconstruction efforts go, however, the less confidence there can be in the outcome. Attempts at such reconstructions typically rely on just such pairings of superficially similar words, but the connections proposed by these theories tend to be conjectural, failing to document significant patterns of linguistic change. Under the disputed Nostratic theory
Nostratic languages
Nostratic is a proposed language family that includes many of the indigenous language families of Eurasia, including the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic as well as Kartvelian languages...

 and similar theories such as that of monogenesis, some of these examples would indeed be distantly related cognates, but the evidence for reclassifying them as such is insufficient. (Alternatively, apparent cognates in Eurasian language families far removed from each other could also be early loanword
Loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...

s, compare Wanderwort
Wanderwort
A Wanderwort is a word that was spread among numerous languages and cultures, usually in connection with trade, so that it has become very difficult to establish its original etymology, or even its original language...

.) The Nostratic hypothesis is however based on the comparative method
Comparative method
In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyzes the internal...

, unlike some other superfamily hypotheses.

Examples

  • Arabic/Hebrew akh/aḥ (brother) and Mongolian
    Mongolian language
    The Mongolian language is the official language of Mongolia and the best-known member of the Mongolic language family. The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 5.2 million, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the Mongolian residents of the Inner...

     akh (brother)
  • Arabic sharif
    Sharif
    Sharīf or Chérif is a traditional Arab tribal title given to those who serve as the protector of the tribe and all tribal assets, such as property, wells, and land. In origin, the word is an adjective meaning "noble", "highborn". The feminine singular is sharifa...

     (and its Portuguese
    Portuguese people
    The Portuguese are a nation and ethnic group native to the country of Portugal, in the west of the Iberian peninsula of south-west Europe. Their language is Portuguese, and Roman Catholicism is the predominant religion....

     descendant "xerife") and English sheriff
    Sheriff
    A sheriff is in principle a legal official with responsibility for a county. In practice, the specific combination of legal, political, and ceremonial duties of a sheriff varies greatly from country to country....

  • Arabic ana/Amharic ena (I) and Gondi
    Gondi language
    Gondi is spoken by the Gondi people. It is a Central-Dravidian language, spoken by about two million people chiefly in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chhattishgarh and in various adjoining areas of neighbouring states...

     ana (I)
  • Arabic ard (earth) and Dutch
    Dutch language
    Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...

     aarde (earth)
  • Arabic/Amharic anta (you, masculine singular) and Japanese
    Japanese language
    is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

     anata (貴方, あなた) / anta (あんた) (you, informal or rude) and Malay "anda" (you)
  • Ashkenazic Hebrew meit(Corpse)/ mot (Shall Die) and Latin
    Latin
    Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

     mors (death)
  • Bengali
    Bengali
    Bengali may refer to something of, from, or related to Bengal, the region roughly divided between West Bengal, Tripura and Bangladesh.* Bengali people, a major linguistic group in South Asia* Bengali Hindu people, the ethnic group native to eastern India....

     fela (throw away/put down) and English fell (to make something fall) and Hebrew naefel (something that fell)
  • Bikol
    Bikol language
    Central Bicolano , is one of the individual languages of the Bikol languages. It belongs to Coastal Bikol. It is spoken in Bicol Region of the Philippines .-Bikol-Naga:...

     aki (child) and Korean
    Korean language
    Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...

     agi (child) and Japanese
    Japanese language
    is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

     aka (baby)
  • Blackfoot
    Blackfoot language
    Blackfoot, also known as Siksika , Pikanii, and Blackfeet, is the Algonquian language spoken by the Blackfoot tribes of Native Americans, who currently live in the northwestern plains of North America...

     aki (woman) and Even
    Even language
    The Even language is a Tungusic language spoken by the Evens in Siberia. It is spoken by widely scattered communities of reindeer herders from Kamchatka and the Sea of Okhotsk in the east to the River Lena in the west, and from the Arctic coast in the north to the River Aldan in the south...

     akhi (woman)
  • Coptic
    Coptic language
    Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the current stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the 1st century...

     per (house) and Etruscan
    Etruscan language
    The Etruscan language was spoken and written by the Etruscan civilization, in what is present-day Italy, in the ancient region of Etruria and in parts of Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna...

     pera (house)
  • Dutch maar (but, from PIE *ne h₂wes-) and Italian
    Italian language
    Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

     ma (but, from PIE *meǵh₂) and Vietnamese mà (but)
  • Egyptian
    Egyptian language
    Egyptian is the oldest known indigenous language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known. Egyptian was spoken until the late 17th century AD in the...

     *marar (to see, to look) and Japanese miru (見る) (to look) and Spanish
    Spanish language
    Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

     mirar (to look at, to watch)/Portuguese
    Portuguese language
    Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...

     mirar (to stare)
  • Egyptian mennu (food) and French menu
  • English
    English language
    English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

     "among" and Bisayan "among" (accidentally included)
  • English "canteen" and Chinese "cāntīng" (餐厅) (dining room, cafeteria), although Pinyin
    Pinyin
    Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also often used to teach Mandarin Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into...

      has the value [ts].
  • English "nerdy" and Chuvash "nĕrtte" (awkward, inept)
  • English lake (from PIE *leg-, to leak) and Latin lacus (lake, pond, from PIE *lakw-)
  • English able and Turkish
    Turkish language
    Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...

     -abil/-ebil (ability infix
    Infix
    An infix is an affix inserted inside a word stem . It contrasts with adfix, a rare term for an affix attached to the end of a stem, such as a prefix or suffix.-Indonesian:...

    )
  • English am (first person present tense of to be), Etruscan am (to be), and Sumerian
    Sumerian language
    Sumerian is the language of ancient Sumer, which was spoken in southern Mesopotamia since at least the 4th millennium BC. During the 3rd millennium BC, there developed a very intimate cultural symbiosis between the Sumerians and the Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism...

     am (to be)
  • English and and Indonesian
    Indonesian language
    Indonesian is the official language of Indonesia. Indonesian is a normative form of the Riau Islands dialect of Malay, an Austronesian language which has been used as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries....

     dan
  • English aye (yes, affirmative vote) and Japanese hai (はい) (yes) and Cantonese "hai" (係) (yes)
  • English boy, Japanese bōya (坊や) (young male child), and Finnish poika (boy, son)
  • English brush and Texmelucan Zapotec 
  • English can and Japanese kan (缶) (cylindrical metal container)
  • English cheek and Russian
    Russian language
    Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

     shcheka (щека; cheek)
  • English chop and Uzbek
    Uzbek language
    Uzbek is a Turkic language and the official language of Uzbekistan. It has about 25.5 million native speakers, and it is spoken by the Uzbeks in Uzbekistan and elsewhere in Central Asia...

     chop
  • English cut and Vietnamese
    Vietnamese language
    Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...

     cắt (to cut)
  • English dairy and Russian doyar (дояр; milker), doyarka (milkmaid)
  • English day, daily and Spanish día (day) (or Latin dies (day) or even English diary)
  • English delete and Russian udalit (удалить; to delete, remove)
  • English dog and Mbabaram dog
  • English dork and Russian durak
  • English dragon and Dzongkha Druk
    Druk
    The Druk is the "Thunder Dragon" of Bhutanese mythology and a Bhutanese national symbol. A druk appears on the Bhutanese Flag, holding jewels to represent wealth. In the Dzongkha language, Bhutan is called Druk Yul, or Land of Druk, and Bhutanese leaders are called Druk Gyalpo, Dragon Kings...

  • English dung and Korean ttong (excrement)
  • English earth and Hebrew erets (אֶרֶץ) (land)
  • English egg and Ganda eggi
  • English evaporate and Russian isparyat' (испарять);
  • English eye Hebrew ayin/ Arabic "`ain" (eye)
  • English great and English grand
  • English house, Hungarian
    Hungarian language
    Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....

     ház (house, block of flats), Finnish
    Finnish language
    Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...

     koti or kota, and corresponding counterparts in other Uralic languages
    Uralic languages
    The Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...

  • English hut and Russian hata (хата)
  • English Indian (native American) and Mescalero Inde (Apache
    Apache
    Apache is the collective term for several culturally related groups of Native Americans in the United States originally from the Southwest United States. These indigenous peoples of North America speak a Southern Athabaskan language, which is related linguistically to the languages of Athabaskan...

    , person)
  • English island and isle
  • English it, Russian eto(это) and Tagalog
    Tagalog language
    Tagalog is an Austronesian language spoken as a first language by a third of the population of the Philippines and as a second language by most of the rest. It is the first language of the Philippine region IV and of Metro Manila...

     eto/ito (it, this)
  • English laser and Scottish Gaelic lasair (light beam, flame)
  • English male and English female, which come from the Latin masculinus and femella, respectively.
  • English man and Latin humanus (people, mankind)
  • English market and Kannada maarukatte
  • English mount (short form of "mountain"), and Hawaiian
    Hawaiian language
    The Hawaiian language is a Polynesian language that takes its name from Hawaii, the largest island in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the state of Hawaii...

     mauna (mountain)
  • English much and Spanish mucho
  • English mysterious and Hebrew mistori (מִסְתּוֹרִי)
  • English name and Japanese namae (name)
  • English neck/German Nacken and Spanish nuca and Hungarian nyak
  • English pan and Mandarin pan/Vietnamese bàn (pan, shallow plate, table)
  • English pear and Korean pay, bae
    Revised Romanization of Korean
    The Revised Romanization of Korean is the official Korean language romanization system in South Korea proclaimed by Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, replacing the older McCune–Reischauer system...

     (Korean pear)
  • English pen and pencil
  • English persecution and Russian presechenie (persecution, suppression, injunction)
  • English reason and Russian razum
  • English seed and Korean ssi (pip)
  • English stone and Mandarin shítou (traditional 石頭, simplified 石头)
  • English strange and Russian stranno (странно)
  • English stranger and Russian strannik (странник)
  • English to have and Portuguese haver (to exist)
  • English trawl (to fish by dragging a net) and English troll (to fish by trailing a line)
  • English two and Korean tu (two)
  • English villain and English vile
  • English viscosity and Russian vyazkost
  • English why and Korean wae (what for)
  • English yea and Korean ye (yes)
  • Estonian
    Estonian language
    Estonian is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various émigré communities...

    /Finnish
    Finnish language
    Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...

     ei (no, not), Etruscan ei (no, not), and Norwegian
    Norwegian language
    Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...

     ei/Swedish
    Swedish language
    Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...

     ej (not)
  • Estonian mina/Finnish minä (I), and Zulu
    Zulu language
    Zulu is the language of the Zulu people with about 10 million speakers, the vast majority of whom live in South Africa. Zulu is the most widely spoken home language in South Africa as well as being understood by over 50% of the population...

     mina (I)
  • Estonian sina/Finnish sinä (singular you) and Turkish
    Turkish language
    Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...

     sen (singular you) (see also: Ural–Altaic languages)
  • Estonian ta (short form of tema) (he/she) and Mandarin tā (他) (he/she)
  • Estonian/Finnish ja (and) and Japanese ya (や) (and, used in an incomplete list)
  • Etruscan
    Etruscan language
    The Etruscan language was spoken and written by the Etruscan civilization, in what is present-day Italy, in the ancient region of Etruria and in parts of Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna...

     ac (to make, act) and Sumerian ak (to make,act)
  • Etruscan an (he/she/it) and Sumerian ane (he/she/it)
  • Etruscan ipa (who, which) and Sumerian aba (who)
  • Etruscan mi (I/me) and Sumerian ma (I/me)
  • Finnish
    Finnish language
    Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...

     kaataa (to cut down) and English cut down (to hew)
  • French
    French language
    French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

     caisse (money box) and Tamil kasu (an ancient monetary unit) (see Cash (disambiguation)
    Cash (disambiguation)
    Cash refers to money in the physical form of currency, such as banknotes and coins.Cash may also refer to:* Cash , a type of struck copper coin with a hole in the middle used in East Asia...

    )
  • French le (the) and Samoan
    Samoan language
    Samoan Samoan Samoan (Gagana Sāmoa, is the language of the Samoan Islands, comprising the independent country of Samoa and the United States territory of American Samoa. It is an official language—alongside English—in both jurisdictions. Samoan, a Polynesian language, is the first language for most...

     le (the)
  • French lien (link) and Mandarin lián/ Vietnamese liên (link)
  • French papillon (butterfly) and Nahuatl
    Nahuatl
    Nahuatl is thought to mean "a good, clear sound" This language name has several spellings, among them náhuatl , Naoatl, Nauatl, Nahuatl, Nawatl. In a back formation from the name of the language, the ethnic group of Nahuatl speakers are called Nahua...

     papalotl (butterfly)
  • French qui est-ce? (who is this?) and Hungarian ki ez? (who is this?)
  • French rue (road) and Mandarin lù (road)
  • Ga
    Ga language
    The Ga language is a Kwa language spoken in Ghana, in and around the capital Accra. It has a phonemic distinction between 3 vowel lengths.-Classification:Ga is a Kwa language, part of the Niger–Congo family...

     ba (come) and Hebrew ba (בא) (come)and Tamil
    Tamil language
    Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of the Indian subcontinent. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in the Indian union territory of Pondicherry. Tamil is also an official language of Sri Lanka and Singapore...

     Va (Come) Note: In Hebrew the B sound is equivalent to a V sound.
  • Ganda
    Ganda
    Ganda may refer to:* Ganda, Tibet, China* Ganda people of Uganda** Ganda language* Ganda Sirait, one of the big ethnic groups in Indonesia* Ganda, Angola* Ganda, the ancient Latin name of Ghent, a city in BelgiumPeople with the given name Ganda:...

     na ('and') and Dutch en (and)
  • German
    German language
    German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

     Ach, so! and Japanese Aa, soo (ああ、そう) (I see)
  • German haben (to have) and Latin habere (to have)
  • German Kreuz (cross) and Russian krest (крест; cross)
  • Greek
    Greek language
    Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

     thesato and Russian sosat (сосать; to suck)
  • Greek root -lab- and Sanskrit
    Sanskrit
    Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...

     root -labh- (take)
  • Greek theos (god) and Greek Zeus (the king of all gods)
  • Greek theos (god) and Latin deus (god)
  • Greenlandic
    Greenlandic
    Greenlandic may refer to:* Something of, from, or related to Greenland, the self-governing Danish province located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago....

     tallimat and Filipino lima (five)
  • Hawaiian
    Hawaiian language
    The Hawaiian language is a Polynesian language that takes its name from Hawaii, the largest island in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the state of Hawaii...

     kahuna (priest) and Hebrew k'hunah (כְּהוּנָה) (priesthood)
  • Hawaiian/Maori
    Maori language
    Māori or te reo Māori , commonly te reo , is the language of the indigenous population of New Zealand, the Māori. It has the status of an official language in New Zealand...

     wahine (woman) and Latin vagina
  • Hebrew
    Hebrew language
    Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...

     "ella" and Greek "alla" (but)
  • Hebrew "ish" (man) and Yana
    Yana
    Yana may refer to:Places* Yana, an administrative capital in Bauchi State, Nigeria* Yana, Burma, a village in Hkamti Township in Hkamti District in the Sagaing Region of northwestern Burma...

     Ishi (man)
  • Hebrew "perot" (פֵּרוֹת) (historically rendered "ferot" following a vowel sound) and English "fruit"
  • Hebrew ari (lion) and Tamil
    Tamil language
    Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of the Indian subcontinent. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in the Indian union territory of Pondicherry. Tamil is also an official language of Sri Lanka and Singapore...

     ari (lion)and Khazakh Aristan
  • Hebrew derekh (דֶרֶך) (road) and Russian doroga (дорога; road)
  • Hebrew shesh (שׁשׁ) (six) with Persian shesh (six) Hurrian šeše (six) and Spanish seis (six)
  • Icelandic
    Icelandic language
    Icelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...

      fold (earth, land, ground) and Hungarian föld (earth, land, soil)
  • Indonesian
    Indonesian language
    Indonesian is the official language of Indonesia. Indonesian is a normative form of the Riau Islands dialect of Malay, an Austronesian language which has been used as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries....

     dua (two) and Pashto dwa (two) and Korean dul (two) and Mandarin dui/ Vietnamese đôi (pair)
  • Indonesian kepala (head) and Greek
    Greek language
    Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

     kephale (head)
  • Inuktitut
    Inuktitut
    Inuktitut or Eastern Canadian Inuktitut, Eastern Canadian Inuit language is the name of some of the Inuit languages spoken in Canada...

     kayak
    Kayak
    A kayak is a small, relatively narrow, human-powered boat primarily designed to be manually propelled by means of a double blade paddle.The traditional kayak has a covered deck and one or more cockpits, each seating one paddler...

     and Turkish kayık
    Caïque
    A caïque , is the term for a traditional fishing boat usually found among the waters of the Ionian or Aegean Seas, and also a light skiff used on the Bosporus. It is traditionally a small wooden trading vessel, brightly painted and rigged for sail...

     and Choco
    Choco languages
    The Choco languages are a small family of Native American languages spread across Colombia and Panama.-Family division:Choco consists of perhaps ten languages, half of them extinct....

     language group cayuca (rowing boat)
  • Italian micio (small cat) and Quechua michi (cat)
  • Japanese
    Japanese language
    is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

     baba (祖母/ばば) ("grandmother") and Russian baba (grandmother)and Yiddish Bubbe (Grandmother)
  • Japanese gaijin (non-Japanese), Romani
    Romani language
    Romani or Romany, Gypsy or Gipsy is any of several languages of the Romani people. They are Indic, sometimes classified in the "Central" or "Northwestern" zone, and sometimes treated as a branch of their own....

     gadjo (non-Gypsy), Hebrew and Yiddish goy (non-Jew) – all of them can mean stranger, foreigner
  • Japanese ne (ね) (tag question
    Tag question
    A question tag or tag question is a grammatical structure in which a declarative statement or an imperative is turned into a question by adding an interrogative fragment . For example, in the sentence "You're John, aren't you?", the statement "You're John" is turned into a question by the tag...

     marker) and colloquial German nä? (tag question marker) and Latin -ne (tag question suffix)
  • Japanese shiru (知る) (know) and Latin scire (know)
  • Korean
    Korean language
    Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...

     tokki (axe) and Mapuche
    Mapuche
    The Mapuche are a group of indigenous inhabitants of south-central Chile and southwestern Argentina. They constitute a wide-ranging ethnicity composed of various groups who shared a common social, religious and economic structure, as well as a common linguistic heritage. Their influence extended...

     natives and Easter Island
    Easter Island
    Easter Island is a Polynesian island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian triangle. A special territory of Chile that was annexed in 1888, Easter Island is famous for its 887 extant monumental statues, called moai, created by the early Rapanui people...

     Polynesian toki (axe)
  • Korean 난 (nan) (I) and Tamil நான் (naan) (I)
  • Kyrgyz
    Kyrgyz language
    Kyrgyz or Kirgiz, also Kirghiz, Kyrghiz, Qyrghiz is a Turkic language and, together with Russian, an official language of Kyrgyzstan...

     ayal (woman) and Parji ayal (woman)
  • Latin ego ("I") and Tagalog
    Tagalog language
    Tagalog is an Austronesian language spoken as a first language by a third of the population of the Philippines and as a second language by most of the rest. It is the first language of the Philippine region IV and of Metro Manila...

     ako ("I")
  • Malay atuk ("grandpa") and Inuit atuk
    Atuk
    thumb|Mordecai Richler's [[The Incomparable Atuk]] on which the script is based on.Atuk is the name of an as-yet-unfilmed American film screenplay, intended to be a film adaptation based upon the 1963 novel The Incomparable Atuk by acclaimed Canadian author Mordecai Richler...

     (grandfather)
  • Mandarin Chinese 你 (nǐ) and Tamil
    Tamil language
    Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of the Indian subcontinent. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in the Indian union territory of Pondicherry. Tamil is also an official language of Sri Lanka and Singapore...

     நீ (nii) (both meaning you)
  • Minangkabau
    Minangkabau language
    The Minangkabau language is an Austronesian language, spoken by the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, the western part of Riau, South Aceh Regency, the northern part of Bengkulu and Jambi, also in several cities throughout Indonesia by migrated Minangkabau, who often trade or have a restaurant...

     duo (two) and Latin
    Latin
    Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

     duo (two)
  • Polish
    Polish language
    Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...

     mieszkanie (apartment) and Hebrew mishkan (מִשׁכָּן) (dwelling)
  • Spanish
    Spanish language
    Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

     como (as/like) and Hebrew k'mo (כְּמוֹ) (as/like) and Arabic kma (as/like)
  • Spanish y [i] ('and') and Slavic и/i [i] (and)
  • Turkish
    Turkish language
    Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...

     bir (one) and Ingain biré (one)
  • Turkish dil and Tagalog dila (tongue)
  • Welsh
    Welsh language
    Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...

     "cwmwl" and Japanese "kumo" (雲) (cloud)

"Mama and papa" type

The basic kinship terms mama and papa
Mama and papa
In linguistics, mama and papa refers to the sequences of sounds , and similar ones known to correspond to the word for "mother" and "father" in many languages of the world....

 (together with the wider class of Lallnamen) comprise a special case of false cognates.
The striking cross-linguistical similarities between these terms are thought to result from the nature of language acquisition
Language acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate. This capacity involves the picking up of diverse capacities including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocal as with...

 (Jakobson
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century...

 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 (nasals like m or n, typically for "mother" words, or stops
Stop consonant
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...

 like p/b and t/d, typically for "father" words, along with the basic vowel
Vowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...

 a). However, variants do occur; for example, in proto-Old Japanese
Old Japanese
is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language.This stage in the development of Japanese is still actively studied and debated, and key Old Japanese texts, such as the Man'yōshū, remain obscure in places.-Dating:...

, the word for "mother" was *papa, and in Slavic languages
Slavic languages
The Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia.-Branches:Scholars traditionally divide Slavic...

, baba
Baba (nickname)
Baba is a common Ukrainian and other Slavic languages nickname for grandmother. It is also used as a nickname for father in countries from the Eastern-Mediterranean to the Far-East. The simple phonetic makeup of Baba is not overlooked by babies, who have been known to utter Baba as their first...

 is a common nickname for "grandmother". In Georgian, the usual pattern (nasal for "mother", stops for "father") is inverted: the word for "father" is mama and the word for "mother" is deda.

See also

  • False friend
    False friend
    False friends are pairs of words or phrases in two languages or dialects that look or sound similar, but differ in meaning....


  • Translation


External links

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