Laowai Chinese 老外中文

Cognate Coincidences

2008 October 31 – 4:49 pm | Categories: Rants| Leave a comment

Chinese has no cognates with English (one of the reasons it’s difficult to learn). So, when I come across words like these, I know one of the words has been imported from one language to another (yes yes, I know, that means there are some cognates NOW–but precious few):

1. sofa = shāfā 沙发 (English -> Chinese)

2. typhoon = táifēng 台风 (Chinese -> English)

But some things I can’t explain at all. Are these just amazing qiǎohé-s? I’d love to know.

Fee = fèi 费

The English word is from the Middle English and Old French term “fief” and the payment fiefs gave to their landlords. If you tell me it’s just a one-in-a-million coincidence that the Chinese word sounds so similar, I’ll accept that…once.

Totem = túténg 图腾

The English word comes from a North American Indian language family called Algonquian. Does that mean that the ancient Chinese people in southern Guangxi who made totems didn’t have a word for it and waited for the term to get imported across the Pacific? Or is this just an amazing coincidence again? I’d be willing to accept that, but not the next one.

Swallow (bird) = yàn 燕
To Swallow = yàn 咽

The two English words have different histories. The word for the bird comes from the Old English “swealwe” akin to the German “schwalbe.” The verb comes from the Old Engilsh “swelgan” which goes back to the Indo-European base “swel-” meaning “to devour” (from which we also get the English word “swill”). Ok, that’s just a coincidence. If we had “yingzi” pictographic characters, the bird and the verb would be two different characters, but the same pronunciation.

But what are the chances that the Chinese name for the bird and the verb are also two different characters but the exact same pronunciation? The others I MIGHT be willing to accept as coincidences, but not this. This is too weird. I’m loosing sleep over this, people. Help! Help!

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19 Responses to “Cognate Coincidences”
syz said:

These are good — when I finally learned the character for fèi I remember thinking it was doubly coincidental that the top part looks a lot like a dollar sign.

How about a false cognate from Latvian for obscure?

其他的, qítāde [mandarin] = other [english] = citādi [latvian]

Now in Latvian c = [ts]. The ā is a lengthened version of the ‘a’ which is the same sound as Mandarin. So the final pronunciation is pretty darned close.

I know it doesn’t matter, but I’ve been trying for years to find an excuse to make the connection. Guess I never will, so here you go — polluting your English-Mandarin false cognates post with a bit of Latvian!

Comment date: Nov 1, 2008
syz said:

btw and not to be picky, but I’m not clear on your typhoon and sofa examples. Aren’t those just borrowings? My limited understanding is that cognates are descended from a common word, which makes them distinct from borrowings and makes it possible to have cognates in the same language…

But maybe you’re saying they’re descended from something else?

Comment date: Nov 1, 2008
syz said:

At the risk of overloading the comment server, I just happened across the following question in a Language Log comment:

“Is the similarity of CAN1TING1 to “canteen” a coincidence?”

This is no doubt a false cognate/borrowing, but I don’t blame anyone for asking. I had that thought cross my mind as well, once upon a time. The funny thing is: go take a look at the thread. It generated another 4700 comments, including some blustering, groundless assertions worthy of a chat board, about whether canteen & cāntīng could be related.

Let that be a warning to you, Albert, about the dangers of bringing up cognates!

Comment date: Nov 1, 2008
Albert said:

syz (I know, appellation unnecessary since it’s just you and me),

1) Latvian example = very cool! I’m willing to accept a coincidence here and there.

2) I’m using “cognate” in the loosest (and perhaps wrongest) sense to mean “a word that sounds the same in two languages and is therefore easy for a learner of a second language to learn.” Your right, technically cognates have a common ancestor (but maybe the word itself can count as an ancestor, no?). I just couldn’t bring myself to call it a borrowing since the Hanzi characters don’t quite get the sounds right (unlike the “McDonald’s” and “Toyota” you hear jump out at you on Spanish TV; now those are true borrowings).

3) Thanks! That’s the other one I couldn’t remember when I wrote this. I think that really is just a coincidence. I love the “translation error” sign.

Comment date: Nov 1, 2008
baomingguang said:

Albert, get a load of this: an alternate version of 咽 is 嚥, which happens to contain 燕 as a component.

The plot thickens…

Comment date: Nov 1, 2008
Helen said:

Many people might be puzzled by those coincidences, including me. 费，yes, $ and 弗，Ah, my watch was slow. What I mean is that I’ve noticed these before, some of which is similar to what you are talking about and some I don’t know what it is. But now I’ll list them all as an example or a clue.
1.
Show —— xiù 秀
Cool —— kù 酷
The two are borrowings definitely. They were imported from English by people speak Cantonese, then joined in mandarin.

2.
yōumò 幽默(transliteration) —— humor(English) —— humor(Latvian) /…

3.
Shock —— xiūkè 休克
The Chinese expression might come after the western medicine was introduced to China . I’m not sure. Who knows?

4. A + B
No problem —— méi wèntí 没问题
Shopkeeper —— diànzhǔ店主
Sunset —— rìluò日落

5. same different meanings
low ；down —— dī低，luò落
低落:depressed
Lowdown —— adj. dījíde低级的: mean, contemptible

pressure —— yālì压力
As N. , both have the two meanings： the force of the air ; stress
V. pressure —— yāpò压迫；shījiā yālì施加压力 To force to do

6.
Talk /tɔ-/ ——tán lùn谈论
Think /ɵɪŋ-/ ——sī kǎo思考

About the last three points , -they’re just fetched from my brain.

Comment date: Nov 1, 2008
chris(mandarin_student) said:

It does not seen so sinister. Aside from borrowings the probability of something like the word for swallow (if it is coincidence) is higher than most people would imagine. Evolution equips us with a low threshold because things that seem to be too much to be a mere coincidence are worth investigating.

Armed with the raw facts the probability of this type of thing could be worked out, Mandarin not having a huge amount of sounds raises the chance (maybe there is even more chance when comparing chinese to English).

This is very boring of course, so any chance the Chinese exported the word for totem to America?

Comment date: Nov 2, 2008
chris(mandarin_student) said:

I just remembered, swallows have a red throat, there is a coincidence involved but not great, could the character the sound for the birds name have originated from the throat?

Comment date: Nov 3, 2008
chris(mandarin_student) said:

drat last comment, I promise, some types of swallows have a red throat…..

Comment date: Nov 3, 2008
Helen said:

canteen cāntīng 餐厅

Comment date: Nov 3, 2008
Jack said:

And what about 吉他 jítā for guitar? That can’t be a coincidence.

Comment date: Nov 6, 2008
Chris Gongsun 公孙海 said:

破 PO4 means ‘poor’ according to Oxford University Press ie. “of poor quality: 破嗓子 a poor voice”

Comment date: Nov 10, 2008
Jerry (just learning) said:

Cool evidence about Totem coming from China to America may be found here http://www.asiaticfathers.com/

Comment date: Nov 12, 2008
Cecillia said:

Very interesting articles~~~~

I didn’t notice so many coincidences exsisting between English and Chinese….(some may be not coincidences~~~)

I will continue to support your blog~~~

(*^__^*) 哈哈！Jia You(加油!)

Comment date: Nov 22, 2008
Cecillia said:

破 PO4 means ‘poor’ according to Oxford University Press ie. “of poor quality: 破嗓子 a poor voice”

God, 我晕！The guy who found this is very smart!!!!!
What a coicidence!!!!

Comment date: Nov 23, 2008
Xan Skinner said:

I think Cantonese has even a few more. For instance (okay I’m going to slaughter the pinyin) di(4)ce (4) for taxi. But here’s an interesting one. One time I told my friend that my daughter was just being “fussy”. She asked me what it meant and I explained. She replied that that’s what fussy means in Cantonese, as well. I’ll think of a few more over time. I speculate that there are more cognates than are commonly acknowledged, however. Mama? Well, that’s pretty basic. But what about words like fever and fashao, car and che, chew and ju(3), fling and fang (放), te (Latin) and ta, amo (latin) and ai, go and zuo . . .

My ear hears a lot more similarity after a few years than it did when I first arrived in China. I don’t know if that’s because my brain is plastic and is finding similarities where there are none, or if it’s simply because I’m less shocked by the unfamiliar and able to hear more things that seem to have a common root after all.

Comment date: Dec 4, 2008
Leo said:

Another interesting funny coincidence :

In French, mother and sea are quasi-homonym, “mère” and “mer”. In Italian and Spanish : “madre”/”mare”. (of course from the latin mare/mater).

In Mandarin, even if the pronunciation is not the same, the hanzi for mother, 母 (also origin/female…) is a part of 海, sea… Well, of course, it is well-known NOW that life came from the oceans

Comment date: Dec 7, 2008
nj said:

Before you assess some of these words for similarity to foreign words, you might want to remember that the current Mandarin pronunciation is not a very good guide to the way they originally sounded - loss of final consonants, tone change etc. (Note that Cantonese is somewhat closer to e.g. Tang Chinese for these reasons). On this note, the Classical Chinese word for “fief” is actually “feng1″ as in “fengjian”. Fei4 is not used in that sense in Zhou or later texts.
Also, similarity in sound doesn’t establish any sort of linguistic relationship. Sorry to throw cold water on what are fun ideas, but linguistically what you have are coincidences in sound, not significant relationships, especially in such small numbers. One swallow to be blunt, doesn’t make a summer (or a meal).
On modern borrowings, it’s quite likely that the source is Japanese. Japan had to borrow quite a number of Western words, especially from the Meiji period on, and so if you look at a good deal of modern scientific and technical vocabulary, you will normally find a Japanese borrowing which has been acquired by Chinese and given its Mandarin pronunciation.
“Po4″ by the way has a general meaning of damaged/broken (and thus bad, of bad quality), from which the dictionary extrapolates “poor”. Pohuai le - it’s smashed/broken, for example.
Finally, cognate (from Latin cognatus - kinsman/relation) in linguistic terms refers to a pair or more words that share a semantic base/root, and so often overlap significantly in sound. However, you don’t get cognates between different linguistic families (not the same thing as different languages), because they don’t share a semantic basis. Instead, you get borrowings or calques.

Comment date: Dec 8, 2008
阿皮 said:

餐厅 is a canteen.

I actually prefer learning Chinese to a language like French because of the lack of cognates. Going from French -> English is fantastic but going the other way is difficult precisely because I don’t know what’s a cognate and what I’m just making up.

Comment date: Dec 30, 2008