You might assume that the Welsh word plant means the same thing it does in English, but this word is a linguistic false friend. The Welsh word plentyn means “child,” and the word plant means “children.” Some false friends are etymologically unrelated, such as the Italian word burro, “butter,” and the Spanish word burro, “donkey.” Others have a common root, but took divergent paths in different languages. The Latin word fastidium, for example, means “loathing” or “disgust,” and gave rise to Spanish fastidioso, which means “annoying” or “tedious,” but also English fastidious, which has the somewhat more positive meaning of “meticulous.” Gift in German means “poison,” but in Norwegian the same word means “married.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Rare False Friends”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Ian Gordon, who lives in the UK, emailed us to ask if we know the Welsh word for children.
I don’t think I do.
I was so excited to learn it.
I didn’t either, but the Welsh word for children is plant, P-L-A-N-T.
Oh.
How cool is that?
That’s a coincidence, right?
Yes, yes.
That’s a complete coincidence.
The word for child is something like plentyn, and the plural for children in Welsh is plent.
And in the language world, we call those kinds of words false friends, the words that look like they mean something that they really don’t.
Right. They look like they’re etymologically related across languages, but it’s just an accident.
Well, sometimes they’re etymologically related, but they mean different things.
For example, the word fastidious in English means meticulous or really careful about detail, but it goes back to a Latin word fastidium, which means loathing or disgust.
And that’s reflected in the Spanish word fastidioso, which actually means annoying or irritating or tedious.
And so if you see that word, you shouldn’t assume that it’s a positive word.
But other times the words are just arbitrary.
The Italian word burro, for example, meaning butter, sounds like the Spanish word and looks like the Spanish word for donkey, right?
But they’re not related at all.
They’re not related at all.
Yeah, and it’s a common etymological mistake.
When people begin to first explore how languages are connected, they find all these accidental, oh, wow, these words are spelled the same or they sound the same.
Almost always it’s just an accident.
There’s no real history there.
It’s just because human mouths make the same sounds, and those sounds combinations are just likely to happen again and again.
Right, right.
So if you’re learning German, you don’t want to give someone a gift because that word means poison in German.
And weirdly enough, it means married in Norwegian.
Right, just like kind and kind.
Your child might be kind, but it’s just a coincidence.
Exactly.
Well, I’m going to share a couple more of those later in the show.
And I bet a lot of our listeners have had experiences learning other languages and maybe being tripped up by something similar.
Absolutely.
And we’re looking for the uncommon ones, too.
So let us know, 877-929-9673.
Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.
