Flammie A Pirinen on github pages
WIP
This page is just another collection of interesting things I noticed learning languages, cognates and loans probably, some might be accidental similarities. I have not researched the backgrounds of these, they are just educated guesses. I only collect word pairs and groups that seem interesting, not everything I see, e.g. internet will not be in the list even though it naturally is copied from the same source in 99 % of the world languages. I might make another list automatedly later though. Also, some that turn out to be not cognates at all are always good help to remember the words as language learner.
| Finnish | English | German | Norwegian | Swedish | Hungarian | Russian |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ananas | pineapple | Ananas | ananas | ananas | ||
| arkkitehti | architect | arkitekt | arkitekt | |||
| kaneli | cinnamon | Zimt | kanel | kanel | ||
| kehittää | develop | entwickeln | utvikle | |||
| kernaasti | happily | gerne | gjerne | |||
| lemmikki | forget-me-not | glemmebok | ||||
| meijeri | milkery¹ | Meierei | meieri | mejeri | ||
| nousta | rise | steigen | stige | |||
| pakottaa | enforce | zwingen | tvinge | |||
| tilata | order | bestellen | bestille | |||
| tulkata | interpret | tolke | ||||
| valtameri | ocean | weltmeer | ||||
| vanki | captive | gefängt | fange | fange | ||
| papukaija | parrot | Papagei | papegøie | papegoi | papagáj | |
| teltta | tent | Zelt | telt | |||
| aiheuttaa | cause | verursachen | forårsake | |||
| pappi | priest | pap | ||||
| mahdollinen² | possible | möglich | mulig | möglig | lehetséges | |
| vitsi | joke | Witz | vits | vicc | ||
| viesti | message | Bescheid | besked | beskéd | ||
| sarvi | horn | szarv | ||||
| miekka | sword | Schwert | svert | svärd | kard | меч |
| aavistus | “premonition” | Ahnung | aning | anelse | ||
| Liima | glue | Leim | lim | lim | ||
| juttu | stuff | Zeug | tøy | |||
| sänky | bed | Bett | seng | |||
| hai | shark | Hai | ||||
| lähde | source | quell | kilde | kjelde |
Pineapple is funny because it’s practically only English that has it like that and all others went with ananas. And pineapple is of course quite ridiculous itself.
¹ milkery as in dairy processing place thing, can be called dairy but is more ambiguous.
Yeah I picked this one up since -eri in Finnish sounds like a native suffix for doing stuff, so I was surprised to find it in non-Finnish, but I should of guessed *meijata is not a word.
This is fun because valta in valtameri can mean mass or power but seeing the German word it looks equally plausible to have been borrowed from that. Not sure what etymologists think atm though.
This is another funny one, since papu in papukaija is Finnish for bean, you don’t initially think it’s just a corruption in borrowing but funny native coined word.
German has brought many borrowings that are surprisingly Finnish sounding words in the animal kingdom, hai being one of them. See also Life of Sharks fact 622 (on Instagram).
² I wonder if mahtaa has same origins though.
Miekka to мец is not super likely but it looked neatly similar :-)
Just because ‘stuff’ is my favourite word, and in germanic it gets used in a lot of compounds, and the Norwegian tøy looks like English ‘toy’ but it’s not the right cognate (‘toy’ is leketøy)… it is possible that English ’toy’ is a shortening of Norwegian or dutch toy.