Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Words of Chinese origin have entered European languages, including English. Most of these were direct loanwords from various varieties of Chinese.However, Chinese words have also entered indirectly via other languages, particularly Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese, that have all used Chinese characters at some point and contain a large number of Chinese loanwords.
Loanwords have entered written and spoken Chinese from many sources, including ancient peoples whose descendants now speak Chinese. In addition to phonetic differences, varieties of Chinese such as Cantonese and Shanghainese often have distinct words and phrases left from their original languages which they continue to use in daily life and sometimes even in Mandarin.
False friends (or faux amis) are pairs of words in two languages or dialects (or letters in two alphabets) that look and/or sound similar, but differ in meaning.. False cognates, by contrast, are similar words in different languages that appear to have a common historical linguistic origin (regardless of meaning) but actually do not.
Linguistic distance is the measure of how different one language (or dialect) is from another. [1] [2] Although they lack a uniform approach to quantifying linguistic distance between languages, linguists apply the concept to a variety of linguistic contexts, such as second-language acquisition, historical linguistics, language-based conflicts, and the effects of language differences on trade.
In English this means one word inherited from a Germanic source, with, e.g., a Latinate cognate term borrowed from Latin or a Romance language. In English this is most common with words which can be traced back to Indo-European languages, which in many cases share the same proto-Indo-European root, such as Romance beef and Germanic cow.
The nickname "New Gold Mountain" was the nickname for the city given by Chinese immigrants and migrant workers looking for gold during the Australian gold rushes. [11] São Paulo: Shèngbǎoluó (圣保罗) [9] Translation-transcription mix Shèng (圣) is used for place names that contain the word "Saint" or one of its cognates in
Similarly, the Hebrew word דיבוב dibúv ("speech, inducing someone to speak"), which is a false cognate of (and thus etymologically unrelated to) the phono-semantically similar English word dubbing, is then used in the Israeli phono-semantic matching for dubbing. The result is that in Modern Hebrew, דיבוב dibúv means "dubbing". [22]
The percentage of cognates (words with a common origin) in the word lists is then measured. The larger the percentage of cognates, the more recently the two languages being compared are presumed to have separated. Below is an example of a basic word list composed of basic Turkish words and their English translations. [9]