Flammie

Flammie A Pirinen on github pages


Project maintained by flammie Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

Flammie’s collection of potential cognates, loans and somesuch

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

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.

Milkery

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.

Ocean

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.

Parrot

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.

Shark

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).

Possible

² I wonder if mahtaa has same origins though.

Sword

Miekka to мец is not super likely but it looked neatly similar :-)

Glue

Stuff

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.