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The cognates in the table below share meanings in English and Spanish, but have different pronunciation. Some words entered Middle English and Early Modern Spanish indirectly and at different times. For example, a Latinate word might enter English by way of Old French, but enter Spanish directly from Latin. Such differences can introduce ...
A mondegreen (/ ˈ m ɒ n d ɪ ˌ ɡ r iː n / ⓘ) is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. [1] Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to hear a lyric clearly, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense.
The word "gringo" did not originate during the Mexican–American War (1846–1848) as a corruption of "Green, go home!", in reference to the green uniforms of American troops. The word originally simply meant "foreigner", and is probably a corruption of the Spanish word griego for "Greek" (along the lines of the idiom "It's Greek to me").
Likewise, English much and Spanish mucho came by their similar meanings via completely different Proto-Indo-European roots, and same for English have and Spanish haber. This is different from false friends, which are similar-sounding words with different meanings, and may or may not be cognates.
It is often assumed that young children learn languages more easily than adolescents and adults. [2] [5] However, the reverse is true; older learners are faster.For example, a study of 17,000 British students showed that those who started learning French aged 11 performed better than those who started learning it aged 8. [6]
If language A borrowed a word from language B, or both borrowed the word from a third language or inherited it from a common ancestor, and later the word shifted in meaning or acquired additional meanings in at least one of these languages, a native speaker of one language will face a false friend when learning the other.
A homograph (from the Greek: ὁμός, homós 'same' and γράφω, gráphō 'write') is a word that shares the same written form as another word but has a different meaning. [1] However, some dictionaries insist that the words must also be pronounced differently, [ 2 ] while the Oxford English Dictionary says that the words should also be of ...
Spanish and Portuguese have acquired different words from various Amerindian, African and Asian languages, as in the following examples: 'pineapple': Sp. piña (from the Spanish word for 'pine cone') / Port. abacaxi (from Tupi) or ananás (from Tupi–Guarani; also in Spanish, by way of Portuguese, ananás or ananá).