This is a false cognate chain between English and Portuguese:
summary/abstract ---> resumo
resume ---> currículo
curriculum ---> materia
material ---> subject
sujeito ---> person
Can't go any farther... sumário can't be a noun and it and pessoa are the same.
Yup. This is where my mind wanders to while I'm getting ready for work in the morning.
Have a good day. :)
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I have no idea what you just said! LOL!
ReplyDeleteYesturday I reassured an adult professional student of mine who is frustrated he is not "thinking in English" yet. Thanks to your thoughts on this subject I was able to congratulate him on all the ways he is getting better and better at translating from Portuguese to English and to dispell the myth that he will wake up one day thinking in English.
We also discussed how his 4 year old son would, after attending school, be the one in their family who comes to "think" in English.
Thanks for your insights.
I was just reading an article on the Zuni language and an isolate. It had a good little summary of language relatedness/unrelatedness including why common, 1 or 2 syllable cognates occur in unrelated languages.
ReplyDeleteI had almost forgotten how cool linguistics is.
Hey, sorry I may be mistaken but curriculum vitae (most people at least in science say CV) can mean curriculo in english,subject and sujeito are the same if you are talking about the function in the frase (analise sintatica) and subject is more like materia instead of material. Hey I enjoy reading your blog. Keep up with the good work!
ReplyDeleteHi Priscila,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the insight. It's true that English can use CV sometimes with the Latin words, but it's important for students to know that they can't say "I'm going to email you my curriculum" instead of "resume". (In England or for a university job, they COULD say "I'm going to email you my CV".)
I know that subject can be the same, because sujeito has a few different meanings in Portuguese. But I think I got confused at the "materia" part and spelled it wrong. I'll go in and change it. Thanks! :)
So, this will reveal how much of a language nerd I can be, but, my friends and I play a False Cognate Chain Game.
ReplyDeleteFirst, we decide which languages can be used based on the crowd's abilities. Then, someone says the first word. After that, someone has to come up with a word in one of the other allowed languages that is a false cognate to the one said. From that, someone else has to find a false cognate to the one that was said in response, and so on. Words cannot ever be used twice in the same language. Each time you're the one who comes up with a word, you get a point. This makes the winner the one who comes up with the most words, discouraging the use of words that are so difficult that the game slows down. If nobody has a response, the person who said the last word shares the response (you must always have a response for your own word) and a new games starts.
I'm not a linguist, but I'm sure creating this game makes me more of a language geek than most...
Brazilian love!