Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
This is a list of words that occur in both the English language and the Spanish language, but which have different meanings and/or pronunciations in each language. Such words are called interlingual homographs. [1][2] Homographs are two or more words that have the same written form. This list includes only homographs that are written precisely ...
False cognates are pairs of words that seem to be cognates because of similar sounds and meaning, but have different etymologies; they can be within the same language or from different languages, even within the same family. [1] For example, the English word dog and the Mbabaram word dog have exactly the same meaning and very similar ...
In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. [1] Because language change can have radical effects on both the sound and the meaning of a word, cognates may not be obvious, and it often takes rigorous study of ...
In linguistics, a false friend is a word in a different language that looks or sounds similar to a word in a given language, but differs significantly in meaning. Examples of false friends include English embarrassed and Spanish embarazado 'pregnant'; English parents versus Portuguese parentes and Italian parenti (both meaning 'relatives'); English demand and French demander 'ask'; and English ...
In English this is most common in borrowings from Latin, and borrowings from French that are themselves from Latin; less commonly from Greek directly and through Latin. In case of borrowing cognate terms, rather than descendants, most simply an existing doublet can be borrowed: two contemporary twin terms can be borrowed.
In Spanglish this usually occurs in the case of "false friends" (similar to, but technically not the same as false cognates), where words of similar form in Spanish and English are thought to have like meanings based on their cognate relationship. [32] Examples:
Ethnic slurs. Cracker: In the United States, the use of "cracker" as a pejorative term for a white person does not come from the use of bullwhips by whites against slaves in the Atlantic slave trade. The term comes from an old sense of "boaster" or "braggart"; alternatively, it may come from "corn-cracker". [ 15 ]
Lexical similarity. In linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. A lexical similarity of 1 (or 100%) would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words. There are different ways to define the lexical similarity and the results ...