Australia and Austria

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. This is Sendel Rivallery in Chicago, Illinois.

Sendel?

It is.

Great name. Well, welcome, Sendel. What’s up?

So, I was doing a crossword a few weeks ago.

You’re one of us.

True. So, I was doing this crossword, which was actually from last October.

So, I’ve gotten a little behind.

And there was a clue that was cluing the letters A-U-S-T.

Actually, I can’t even remember whether it was referring to Austria or Australia.

And it got me wondering why those names are so similar.

Because I remember being confused about this when I was a kid.

And when I was teaching, at least one of my students was wondering about that, too.

And it’s weird because I thought the name Austria came from German, from the word for East.

And the word for Australia came from Latin, which refers to south.

That seems like not the same thing, but too much of a coincidence to be chance.

Yeah, it’s weird.

What’s Austria doing over there and Australia doing way down there and they have different roots?

But it is a coincidence, Sindel.

Yeah, it’s a coincidence.

Well, that’s very disappointing.

Well, here, listen to this.

There’s a linguist by the name of Mark Rosenfelder, and he’s actually done a statistical analysis to look for the chance that these exact kinds of coincidences can happen in between different languages.

And it’s a little different than within the same language.

And I don’t know enough to really assess his math, but his conclusion is interesting.

He says that the chance of coincidence is high enough that we should not be surprised that two languages can have virtually the same word, say same spelling or similar pronunciation, two words that mean the same thing.

Because the thing is there’s so many languages and each of them have so many words and the history of the world is so vast and the things that humans are all interested in are also similar.

And the sounds that we make with our mouths are also similar.

You know, languages, they all take one small subset of all the possible sounds of the human mouth.

But then the sounds that they do take are configured in a variety of kind of predictable ways.

So he says that the coincidence is a yawner almost, and that we should just expect this kind of thing to happen.

Do you know of any other coincidences that are similar?

Well, fortunately, there is a whole collection of this sort of thing.

There are numerous webpages that the one I’ll refer you to, boy, I really hate referring people to Wikipedia.

Because it’s so unreliable.

But for what it’s worth, go to Wikipedia and look up the word false cognate.

You probably know that phrase, right?

No, that’s the first time I’ve heard it.

A false cognate, that’s C-O-G-N-A-T-E, false cognate.

This is a pair of words that appear to be the same, but they aren’t.

Either they’ve become separated somewhere etymologically.

So that they used to mean the same thing, but they no longer do.

Or they were never the same or never meant the same thing.

They just look alike.

My example that I typically use is the word R-E-D, which means the red in English, and it means network in Spanish.

And, of course, the most famous Spanish-English false cognate is embarrass and embarazada, right?

Embarazada, right?

Embarazar, which means to get pregnant.

To get pregnant.

And, of course, French and English have a huge number of these.

And they’re not quite the same as the coincidence that you’re talking about, because a lot of them are related historically and etymologically.

But somewhere along the way, they’ve become so different from each other in their separate languages that they can no longer be considered synonyms.

Yeah, they’re called false cognates or false friends or faux amis.

Yeah.

Hey, Sindel, thanks for a great question.

Thank you.

All right, take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you’re lost in a linguistic thicket, we can help you get your bearings.

You can always drop by our discussion forum.

You’ll find that at waywordradio.org/discussion.