Funny false friends

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yes, I wanted to mention that we have "pička" in Croatian, but we pronounce that "ka" in the end (despite what Wiktionary says) so I didn't think it would qualify. But I didn't know it was so ubiquitous in other Slavic languages

Also, we use "kara" in slang for the gentleman's sausage as well, but Albanians beat us at being closer to English.

Where does Wiktionary say that?

On the other hand, picha is a slangish word for the gentleman’s sausage in Spanish and Portuguese, though it’s also spelled pixa in the latter language. I think the existence of this word may be the reason pizza hasn’t fully adapted to Spanish phonetics and everyone makes the effort to preserve the Italian consonant cluster (['pit.sa]) or some creative variation (e.g., ['pik.θa]), rather than the native affricate [tʃ], normally spelled ch.

Also, cara means ‘face’ as a noun, and ‘dear’ or ‘expensive’ as and adjective (feminine singular form; the grammatically unmarked form is the masculine singular caro).

dunno, unless i read it wrongly it says this: • IPA: /ˈpitʃo/?

I thought this "ʃ" means "č" or "š"?

since this is how we have it - with the "k": /pît͡ʃka/

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pi%C4%8D ... o-Croatian



and carus has some latin false friends:

carrus as a noun (celtic root) apart from meaning different kinds of wagons, can also be a unit of weight in medieval English.

kar in turkish means snow and kâr means profit.

kuruma means 'car' in japanese, the same kuruma means 'don't get dry!' in turkish.

That’s the pronunciation of the Esperanto word piĉo.



And Latin caro (‘flesh, meat’), which doesn’t look much like its Romance descendants, because these generally come from forms other than the nominative, all of which had an n following the r.

ah thanks for that, I mistook it for the Slavic pronunciation.

car is also an engraving beetle in Romanian (Bostrychus chalcographus)

English award and Spanish and Portuguese aguardar (‘to wait for, to await’ if used with a direct object, or simply ‘to wait’ otherwise).

The second components are cognates. The Germanic lexeme which became ward in English was borrowed into Vulgar Latin, accommodating the foreign initial semiconsonant by prepending a g sound. Centuries later, it was borrowed back into English as guard.

The a- prefixes aren’t cognates, as can be expected from the fancily divergent changes in meaning they introduce. They don’t even sound particularly alike for a lone phoneme, since there are no reduced vowels in either Spanish or Portuguese.

English salvage (to rescue) and Spanish salvaje (wild, feral)

The river that flows past the US capital city retains the original Native American name of "Potomac" which happens to be similar to the Greek word for "river" which is "Potomou". Pure coincidence.

cocoș in romanian is male chicken
kokoš in croatian is female chicken

Kokoş in Turkish, somebody who wears fancy clothes mostly in inappropriate situations

French ambre ('amber') and Spanish hambre ('hunger'). Pronounced as close as phonetics allows.

H is silent in Spanish. So those two words would sound the same. Trouble is that within Spanish "hambre" sounds pretty much the same as "hombre" (man, also Spanish) to me. So …. is a "bad hombre" a member of MS13? Or just your own growling stomach? Lol!

Well, I said as close as phonetics allows because there are still major differences in the way the m, the r and the final e are pronounced in both languages.

The m works in Spanish the same as in English: you actually pronounce a nasal consonant, closing your lips and expelling air entirely through your nose for a brief time. In French, you don't; you just "color" the preceding vowel, by letting air out through both your mouth and your nose, as if you're just about to produce the nasal consonant, but the b comes before you ever do it.

The r (actually, both Spanish r phonemes, but that's another story) remains alveolar (like the t in English metal pronounced with flapping) in Spanish, as it was formerly in a lot of European languages, but has become uvular (resembling a drawn-out hard g sound) in most current educated spoken French. The same happened in several neighboring languages, like German, and it's not clear where the phenomenon originated.

The final, unaccented e isn't pronounced as a distinct vowel in French in this context, but it certainly is in Spanish. The latter language has only five vowels, and five there are in any position, stressed or not; there's no room for reduced vowels, and much less for a consonant to become a syllable nucleus in their stead.

These differences are enough to make it hard for an untrained speaker of one language to recognize the word in the other when spoken. But it's still as close as you can get, so when said speakers do learn the other language, they're indeed likely to pronounce these two words identically, unless they've worked pretty hard on their phonetics.

Being stressed, the leading vowels in Spanish hambre and hombre should be relatively easy for English speakers to tell apart. It's probably easier if you're used to the rounded pronunciation of English short o (as in stop), but anyway, Spanish o is pronounced with your mouth much less open than that. Better liken it to the vowel in door, without actually lengthening or r-coloring it, or with the very beginning of the diphthong in home. It's definitely much closer to both than it is to an English short o, rounded or not.

Esperanto and Latin nove ('newly'), and Italian and Portuguese nove ('nine').

English vanilla comes from Spanish vainilla, which is certainly the Spanish name of the plant, and morphologically a diminutive of vaina (‘pod’ or ‘scabbard, sheath’), which, by the way, evolved from Latin vāgīna, and is therefore a doublet of the later borrowing vagina. Vanilla itself exists as a readily understandable, though not really used, Spanish word: it’s a regularly formed diminutive of the feminine singular form (vana) of the adjective vano (‘vain, futile, pointless’). It doesn’t sound like the English word, because Spanish v is always pronounced like a b (in fact, vainilla was also borrowed into Portuguese as baunilha) and a double l represents a different consonant from a single one.

Speaking of sheaths, the Esperanto suffix -ingo means ‘socket, holder’, as in glavingo (‘scabbard, sheath’), from glavo (‘sword’). Considering the words for ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are viro and virino, respectively, you can probably guess why one of the many Esperanto words coined to serve as the universal insult for a woman, like English slut, is viringo.