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The idea that a language ends up a lingua franca because of its qualities is simply ridiculous. It’s not linguistics, it’s empire. It’s always empire.
The word set has more definitions than any other word in the English language iirc. I’d actually love to hear how each meaning came to be. Whether it’s from other languages or just English being what it is.
I’ve yet to see any of the English haters point out a real (not engineered) language that’s more functional. Every language has it’s own pitfalls, in its amalgamation of other popular world languages English bridges over many of them.
Also “false cognates” seems to be either outdated concept or used here as a term that looks scienc-y to make the idea seem more legit, but in modern linguistics it’s probably just called homonymy and the words are called homonyms. It is also possible for a word to be both homonymous and polysemous but I don’t remember a good example in English. DDG ai summary gave me the word “bank” as an example, but it looks like as a noun it just has different meanings, not two different etymologies, so it’s just polysemy, not homonymy. The shorter the word, the higher the chance it is homonym or has multiple meanings/definitions.
Hmm, the only time I learned about false cognates was when learning high school Spanish, so I assumed it meant two words that sound similar in different languages but have different meanings, rather than homonyms in the same language.
Example: embarrassed and embarazado
Looking the above example up for spelling, I see it’s called a false friend, and perhaps I misunderstood false cognate (from here https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#false_cognate ) :
false cognate
A word in a language that bears a phonetic and semantic resemblance to a word in another or the same language but is not etymologically related to it and thus not a true cognate. Examples include English day/Portuguese dia, German Feuer/French feu (both meaning “fire”), Malay dua/Sanskrit द्व (dva) (both meaning “two”), and English dog/Mbabaram dog. Compare false friend.false friend
A word in a language that bears a phonetic resemblance to a word in another language, often because of a common etymology, but has a different meaning. Examples include English parent/Portuguese parente (“relative”) and English embarrassed/Spanish embarazada (“pregnant”). Compare false cognate.Yeah I’ve looked into wiki page for “false cognates” after leaving that reply, it would make sense to have a name for a situation where words from different languages sound similar and have similar definitions but are not etymologically related, but according to the wiki false cognates also can be words from the same language and I just don’t see the need to call them false cognates in this case, to my understanding they are called homonyms if they are identical in spelling and pronunciation but differ in etymology/definition, or homophones if they sound the same but are spelled differently. Vsauce made an awesome video on this topic a while ago.
False friends are for translators/interpreters, they are referred to as “translators’ false friends” because people make mistakes when making translations while having insufficient experience, like that example that you give with embarrassed and embarazada
But bank does have at least 2 etymologies.
This is an example. Bank can be the money bank or a bank of a river.
Cool didn’t know that, then it looks like DDG ai was right
Well even when I read your reply I immediately thought of the 2 different meanings and said to myself “surely those cannot have the same etimology.”
Always good check them facts
Interestingly, I read “scale, scale, and scale” with the same meanings popping in my head in sequence as her explanations were in.
I guess we’d better all speak PIE
this is why English is a bad choice for a lingua franca
That conclusion doesn’t follow, unless you further append something like “Lernu Esparonton!” to indicate you have a misguided belief that language needs to make sense to be useful.
You also have the benefit of a language like English able to steal words from all languages in that English has a flexible ruleset to communicate. Your don’t have to communicate perfectly in English to communicate in English.
Wouldn’t the French escale also have stemmed from the latin scala at some point?
These comments are the reason why I like Lemmy / the Fediverse so much. Thank you!
I’m wondering if scale, as in the crud that can build up on certain materials under certain conditions, is simply derived from the fish scale sense. It would seem like it, since it’s the ‘shell or husk’ Otherwise, yay, a fourth meaning!
It’s the fish scale meaning. If I could post all of the OED stuff here I would. The sense of flaking from a husk or rind is from the 1450s - onion skin is referenced in this sense. Oxide films like rust date in the 1520s, and scale for tooth tartar is from the 1590s.
Now what about a music scale?
