False cognates

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Imralu
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Re: False cognates

Post by Imralu »

eldin raigmore wrote:
Edit: And the "m" is syllabic, or at least moraic; it gets its own note in the song.
Apparently the "(a)wimaway" stuff comes from uyimbube meaning "you are a lion", which I think is u-y-i-mbube 2s-COP-EXT-lion ... with EXT standing for a kind of prefix, I don't know what it's actually called so I'll just call it an extention, but it's in a lot of Bantu languages but not Swahili and appears on nouns in certain situations, like an extended version of the class marking prefix. The first i of isiZulu is this prefix. I can tell from its form, "i-", plus the following nasal, that this noun is in class 9, which is, in Swahili, where the majority of animal names are housed. In any case, Zulu seems to be like Swahili, with a syllabic <m> in class 1 (derived from "mu", extention syllable "u-", so "um(u)-") and a non-syllabic nasal prefix in class 9 (with the extention syllable "i-"). In any case, the full word uyimbube has enough syllables to account for the song.
Glossing Abbreviations: COMP = comparative, C = complementiser, ACS / ICS = accessible / inaccessible, GDV = gerundive, SPEC / NSPC = specific / non-specific, AG = agent, E = entity (person, animal, thing)
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Re: False cognates

Post by eldin raigmore »

Imralu wrote:Apparently the "(a)wimaway" stuff comes from uyimbube meaning "you are a lion", which I think is u-y-i-mbube 2s-COP-EXT-lion ... with EXT standing for a kind of prefix, I don't know what it's actually called so I'll just call it an extention, but it's in a lot of Bantu languages but not Swahili and appears on nouns in certain situations, like an extended version of the class marking prefix. The first i of isiZulu is this prefix. I can tell from its form, "i-", plus the following nasal, that this noun is in class 9, which is, in Swahili, where the majority of animal names are housed. In any case, Zulu seems to be like Swahili, with a syllabic <m> in class 1 (derived from "mu", extention syllable "u-", so "um(u)-") and a non-syllabic nasal prefix in class 9 (with the extention syllable "i-"). In any case, the full word uyimbube has enough syllables to account for the song.
Thanks bigly!
I didn't know any of that, and found all of it interesting!
Especially that EXT. Where can I find out more about that EXT?
Thanks again!

(BTW how would you parse "umabatha" (don't know what to capitalize!), Zulu's name for the protagonist of Will S.'s Scottish play?)
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Re: False cognates

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What I called "EXT" is an indicator of "topic state" in Luganda, and, the word I had forgotten, is called an augment in Zulu grammar.

That's latter is a really good link BTW. I'm working on bits and pieces of a Swahili grammar article because it's kind of a travesty that there isn't a nice detailed article like that for Swahili grammar. Coming along very slowly. Also, Zulu entries in Wiktionary are quite detailed. Look up a noun (including the augment, eg. imbube, not just mbube) and look at the huge variety of forms! (The possessive forms are with the noun itself as the possessor, not as the possessum, more or less like the word for "of" (which inflicts for the class of its possessum) has gloomed onto the beginning of the possessor noun.)

Swahili is so simple. Nouns have two forms - maybe four if you count the locatives as inflections rather than derivatives. Lion is simba. Lions is simba too. There's no locative form (and if there were, it'd be regular), no augment, no possessive forms - that's all done with particles. The Wiktionary template for Swahili verbs has big errors in the relative forms and I don't know how or where to go to fix it.

As for umabatha, I'm not sure. The augment is practically always an echo of the vowel in the simple class prefix, so Zulu has all these words starting with umu-, aba-, isi-, izi-, ubu- etc. (equivalent to m-, wa-, ki-, vi-, u- in Swahili) - which usually helps me tell it's Zulu (Xhosa looks similar but has more clicks <c q x>) but the lack of that pattern makes me think this is a class 1a noun, using the class 1 augment but no simple prefix - which would make sense. I'd tentatively suggest uMabatha but I have no idea what Mabatha is. I don't think that m is the simple class prefix just because I would expect that it would come out as mw before a vowel like it does in Swahili, so I think the stem starts with m, but that's all pretty tentative. Swahili just capitalises the first letter, so Mswahili, Waswahili, Kiswahili, without a capital S. So much easier!
Glossing Abbreviations: COMP = comparative, C = complementiser, ACS / ICS = accessible / inaccessible, GDV = gerundive, SPEC / NSPC = specific / non-specific, AG = agent, E = entity (person, animal, thing)
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Re: False cognates

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:ind: Hindi ख़राब <kharaab> /kʰəˈrɑːb/ dirty, spoiled ~ :usa: English corrupt /kʰəˈɹʌpt/
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Re: False cognates

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:esp: Spanish: lumbre "combustible material" vs :usa: English: lumber "wood"
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Re: False cognates

Post by eldin raigmore »

Imralu wrote:What I called "EXT" is an indicator of "topic state" in Luganda, and, the word I had forgotten, is called an augment in Zulu grammar.
.... (plus other good stuff not repeated for reasons of space and time) ....
Thanks loads!
Swahili is so simple.

Isn't that why it's the Bantu lingua franca? The range in which, and population among which, it's the original native tongue, are (reportedly) rather smallish -- right?
There are several complexities which most Bantu languages have, but of which nearly each has its own flavor, that Swahili lacks entirely (isn't tone one of them?). Or so I understand, (assuming I remember right what I thought I understood). Isn't it's noun-class system also a bit simpler than the Bantu average?
As for umabatha, I'm not sure. The augment is practically always an echo of the vowel in the simple class prefix, so Zulu has all these words starting with umu-, aba-, isi-, izi-, ubu- etc. (equivalent to m-, wa-, ki-, vi-, u- in Swahili) - which usually helps me tell it's Zulu (Xhosa looks similar but has more clicks <c q x>) but the lack of that pattern makes me think this is a class 1a noun, using the class 1 augment but no simple prefix - which would make sense. I'd tentatively suggest uMabatha but I have no idea what Mabatha is. I don't think that m is the simple class prefix just because I would expect that it would come out as mw before a vowel like it does in Swahili, so I think the stem starts with m, but that's all pretty tentative. Swahili just capitalises the first letter, so Mswahili, Waswahili, Kiswahili, without a capital S. So much easier!
Considering it was "Macbeth" or "McBeth" in the original tlHingaan, I'd guess "uMabatha" or "umaBatha".
Given what you just said I'd go with "uMabatha" -- if "Mabatha" could be a clan name or a personal name.

So how about "Double, double toil, and trouble!" in either Zulu or Swahili?
Or "She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word. Oh, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day ..."

BTW does amaZulu mean the populace, or the ethnicity, or the language?
Edit: Almost forgot to say "Thank you"!
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Re: False cognates

Post by Imralu »

eldin raigmore wrote:
Imralu wrote:What I called "EXT" is an indicator of "topic state" in Luganda, and, the word I had forgotten, is called an augment in Zulu grammar.
.... (plus other good stuff not repeated for reasons of space and time) ....
Thanks loads!
You're very welcome! I enjoyed looking for this stuff and talking about it, so ... yay!
Swahili is so simple.

Isn't that why it's the Bantu lingua franca? The range in which, and population among which, it's the original native tongue, are (reportedly) rather smallish -- right?
There are several complexities which most Bantu languages have, but of which nearly each has its own flavor, that Swahili lacks entirely (isn't tone one of them?). Or so I understand, (assuming I remember right what I thought I understood). Isn't it's noun-class system also a bit simpler than the Bantu average?
Yeah, I'd actually wager that it's not why Swahili is a lingua franca but because it is. When large numbers of people communicate in a language they're not fluent in, it affects the language. It's probably part of the reason why the grammar of English is so different compared to the other Germanic languages. Swahili was probably a fairly ordinary Bantu language that simply happened to be in the right place when trade (incl. human trade) sprang up with the Arabs and it was carried inland along caravan routes by them, and it was further strengthened as a lingua franca by British (and to a lesser extent German) colonialism. If I remember correctly, the Brits used the Swahili people to help unify the people further inland under British rule and tried to paint a picture of the Swahili language and people not as African people speaking an African language with some Arabic influence but an even blend of Arabic and African forebears in order to seem less "arrivey and takey overy" and more like "you guys are just like us ... now please help us control the African Africans". (Don't quote me on any of this ... this is pulled from my "knowledge of unknown source" file.) It was the Brits and European missionaries who established the Unguja (Zanzibar Island) dialect of Swahili as the standard.

Swahili lacks tone and I think it's the only Bantu language not to have tone ... I'm not sure about Comorian, but it's sometimes classed as a dialect of Swahili and it has also gone through quite a lot of Arabic influence (I believe they still write it with the Arabic script). Also, it also lacks any really difficult consonants or weird clusters that Bantu languages often have. In the south, Bantu languages tend to have clicks. Bantu languages closer to Swahili often have fairly bizarre things, like Shona, which has /dʲɡ/ <dy>, /dβz/ <dzv> etc. (the latter of which looks completely insane, but that's apparently how you describe whistled sibilants), and Kinyarwanda which has funny clusters like /ɾɡw/ <rw>, /tkw/ <tw> etc. I mean, those are not so difficult really, but you often read about Bantu languages being basically CVCVCVCVCVCVCV and ... that's often only if you count these funny clusters as single phonemes, which is a bit odd, but if it's simpler to describe the language that way, why not? And a bunch of languages near Swahili, such as Kikuyu have Dahl's law which is a voicing dissimilation thing that messes up some of the prefixes (eg. Kikuyu would better be called Gikuyu).

Swahili lacks all of those features. The only things which are cross-linguistically fairly difficult are the borrowed phonemes from Arabic /θ ð ɣ x/ ... and the whole syllabic nasal thing, but that's pretty common across Africa. Also, where prenasalisation was lost on voiceless consonants, that has been retained as aspiration, which results in some minimal pairs such as aspirated paa "gazelle(s)" (class 9/10) and unaspirated paa "roof" (class 5/6), but most speakers are non-native speakers who probably don't reliably distinguish those. I do also remember reading that there is an increasing general tendency towards aspiration on word-initial and immediately pre-tonic consonants and no aspiration elsewhere. Aspiration in Swahili is no longer indicated in writing, but early romanisations of Swahili used an apostrophe for aspirated consonants. <h> would look nicer and would probably have stayed around, and it's used in Zulu, Chichewa etc to indicate aspirates, but I guess <th> and <kh> were needed for /θ/ and /x/ ... in any case, if you do care about it, it's often fairly predictable from noun class because class 9/10 historically had a prenasalising prefix.

The noun class system of standard Swahili (Kiswahili sanifu) is actually almost identical to that of Zulu. Both have lost classes 12 and 13 and anything above 18. Zulu also lacks the locative classes 16 and 18, having only one locative class, 17, whereas Swahili has preserved all three ... although their prefixes have been lost on nouns, with only the suffix -ni being retained. It's interesting, reading about the locative forms of Zulu nouns ... there are nouns that only have a prefix to form the locative in Swahili and those that use a prefix and a suffix and the suffix is preserved in Swahili in essentially the same places, and where Zulu only uses the prefix, marking an explicit locative is impossible in Swahili without some other help.

But yes, in Swahili as it's actually spoken by a lot of non-native speakers, especially in Kenya, the nouns retain all the same prefixes and pluralise the same way as in Kiswahili sanifu, but the system of agreement is reduced to basically just 4 classes ... 1/2 for animates and 9/10 for inanimates. In standard Swahili, almost all agreements for animate nouns have fallen to class 1/2, but inanimate agreement follows grammatical consistency rather than semantic. The best example I have from this is a sentence an old Kenyan colleague of mine in Australia wrote to me: Kiswahili yako ni nzuri. In Kiswahili sanifu that would be Kiswahili chako ni kizuri, but he used class 9 concords to agree with the class 7 noun ... which is what most people do. Everyone has to learn it in school and understand it passively but probably no one really cares about sounding like a Zanzibari and bothers to remember it. Kenyan music often has this kind of agreement too.

When thinking of native speakers, it's probably also pertinent to remember that there are essentially two types of native speakers: those from traditional Swahili areas along the coast (and their descendants) who have unbroken Swahili-fluent ancestry, and the "new native speakers" who are increasing in number, chiefly in urban areas outside of the original Swahili-as-native-language range, where people who have moved to the city have children with people of a different language background. Non-native Swahili is then the language at home and also among peers, so there is kind of a creolising effect on the language, although probably not to the extent where there is a completely sharp divide between creolised and non-creolised native speakers. I have a Lonely Planet Swahili phrasebook and in the grammar at the beginning, it only teaches this 4-noun-class variety of Swahili, calling it "survival Swahili" ... although in the phrases throughout the rest of the book, there is clean standard Swahili, except for where lists of interchangeable words of various noun classes make this impractical. It's interesting to see what will develop out of this. South Sudan has announced they are going to make it an official language as they move towards the East African Union and away from the Arabisation of northern Africa, and the South Sudanese government has apparently had dealings with Tanzania about getting help to start it up by bringing in Swahili teachers from Tanzania. Swahili seems to be strengthening rather than being overrun by a large non-African language.

I'm also quite interested in its significance in Pan-Africanism and African-American identity politics. It's interesting because, even though it's an African language with significant non-African influences, it seems to have been chosen for its symbolism as a large, widely spoken sub-Saharan language ... probably also doesn't hurt that it's non-tonal and relatively simple for outsiders to learn compared to, say, Hausa.

Also, trivia for nothing: paa "gazelle" is a direct cognate with impala which comes from Zulu. The i- is the class 9 augment (absent in Swahili), the m- is the class 9 prenasalisation (disappeared in Swahili in front of voiceless consonants). Swahili, at least in the standard dialect, also had a sound change whereby an /l~r/ was deleted between the last two vowels of a word (ie. post-tonically) (although it's preserved dialectically and a lot of words haven't gone through this sound change, probably because of inter-dialectal sharing ... pala also exists as a name specifically for the impala, with paa generally referring to the duiker. Another word for antelope is swala which has also obviously bypassed this sound change, and for example, there is swala pala "impala", swala tomi "Thompson's gazelle" and swala twiga "gerenuk" (literally "giraffe antelope").
Considering it was "Macbeth" or "McBeth" in the original tlHingaan, I'd guess "uMabatha" or "umaBatha".
Given what you just said I'd go with "uMabatha" -- if "Mabatha" could be a clan name or a personal name.
Ah ... well, given the capitalisation in English, maybe uMaBatha, lol! I guess that's a bit too ridiculous. I was wondering what the original was.
So how about "Double, double toil, and trouble!" in either Zulu or Swahili?
Until now, I've never even thought about what that might mean other than just a sequence of sounds. Is for a malicious spell, as a literal imperative directed at hard work and problems that they may increase by 100%? If so, I guess Rudufiwa, rudufiwa, kazi na .... none of the words I can find for "trouble" rhyme perfectly.
Or "She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word. Oh, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day ..."
Ah, I'm bad at this stuff when I don't know exactly what it means ... too artsy fartsy for me without context ... also "should have" is pretty hard and there are a few things that could mean in English. And hereafter ... with "should have" makes no sense to me. Is creeps a noun or a verb? I'll try. I won't gloss it just yet, but I'll translate it back freely to show you which sense I took and how far wrong it could be.

Alipaswa kufa baadaye; kungalikuwa na wakati wa neno kama hili. Ee, kesho, na kesho, na kesho, hutambaa huku siku kwa siku.
= S/he was obliged to die afterwards/later; there would have been time for a word like this one. All right, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, (unspecified subject habitually) crawls to a place around here day by day.
BTW does amaZulu mean the populace, or the ethnicity, or the language?
Hmm, well, I recognise that as class 6 but Swahili doesn't do anything like that with class six. Class six is sometimes used for abstract nouns though ... according to Glosbe, it means the ethnic group ... it might be a collective, more or less like "Zulu nation" or something. According to the translations below, it also happens to mean "heavens". An individual Zulu person is an umZulu (cl 1), with the plural being abaZulu (cl 2) and the language is isiZulu (cl 7). The word *ubuZulu, if it exists, would probably mean something like "Zuluhood" or "Zuluness"
Glossing Abbreviations: COMP = comparative, C = complementiser, ACS / ICS = accessible / inaccessible, GDV = gerundive, SPEC / NSPC = specific / non-specific, AG = agent, E = entity (person, animal, thing)
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Re: False cognates

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

Apparently :eng: nod is not related to :lat: nuō, "I nod". I just learned that. I always assumed they were cognate.
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Re: False cognates

Post by All4Ɇn »

:bra: ema "rhea bird"
:eng: emu
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Re: False cognates

Post by ixals »

:hun: tető
:ita: tetto

Both meaning "roof", even the flags are similar in this case! [:D]
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Re: False cognates

Post by Imralu »

:lat: mūtāre "to change, alter, move, relocate"
:fin: muuttaa "to change, alter, move, relocate"
Glossing Abbreviations: COMP = comparative, C = complementiser, ACS / ICS = accessible / inaccessible, GDV = gerundive, SPEC / NSPC = specific / non-specific, AG = agent, E = entity (person, animal, thing)
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Re: False cognates

Post by Imralu »

:tan: kwale "quail", "partridge", "francolin"
:eng: quail

It looks like a weird loan through a misspelling, but it seems to be from Proto-Bantu *-kʊ̀àdɪ́ "francolin".
Glossing Abbreviations: COMP = comparative, C = complementiser, ACS / ICS = accessible / inaccessible, GDV = gerundive, SPEC / NSPC = specific / non-specific, AG = agent, E = entity (person, animal, thing)
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Re: False cognates

Post by GrandPiano »

:jpn: Classical Japanese 恋ふ *kopu (reconstructed pronunciation) "to love"
:eng: copulate
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Re: False cognates

Post by Shemtov »

:ind: दाम /da:m/ "Price" :isr: /damijm/ "Money"
:rus: в /v/ :isr: /bə/ (/b/ in Hebrew can lenite to /v/) "In"
:hkg: 大人/tai˩ jan˧˩/ "Your Honor" :isr:/dajan/ "Judge"
:hkg: 這 /t͡sɛ/ :isr: /zɛ/ "This"
Last edited by Shemtov on 03 Nov 2017 18:00, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: False cognates

Post by k1234567890y »

English promise and promiscuous
I prefer to not be referred to with masculine pronouns and nouns such as “he/him/his”.
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Re: False cognates

Post by k1234567890y »

sorry for double post, but English roam is not related to Romani rom “man”, although the connotation of Romani people in Europe can make the two words seemingly connected.
I prefer to not be referred to with masculine pronouns and nouns such as “he/him/his”.
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Re: False cognates

Post by Iyionaku »

k1234567890y wrote: 03 Nov 2017 14:52 sorry for double post, but English roam is not related to Romani rom “man”, although the connotation of Romani people in Europe can make the two words seemingly connected.
That propably means that it's not related to roman either, as I had always assumed. TIL!
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Re: False cognates

Post by gestaltist »

k1234567890y wrote: 02 Nov 2017 23:39 English promise and promiscuous
Don't tell me there's no promise in promiscuous. [}:D]
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Re: False cognates

Post by esoanem »

Iyionaku wrote: 14 Nov 2017 14:26
k1234567890y wrote: 03 Nov 2017 14:52 sorry for double post, but English roam is not related to Romani rom “man”, although the connotation of Romani people in Europe can make the two words seemingly connected.
That propably means that it's not related to roman either, as I had always assumed. TIL!
Apparently this is a common misconception and one which is particularly popular amongst Romanian anti-Roma bigots who complain that the Roma have stolen everything from them, even their name. As with most allegations made of the Roma people as a whole, this is bullshit.
My pronouns are they/them/their

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Re: False cognates

Post by Creyeditor »

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