Ménage à 3 Universe Comics

Note that I used the masculine form court intentionally.

Because it's identical in spelling to the English word court. English and French are both European languages with a considerable history of linguistic osmosis from the latter on part of the former. I thought that was obvious.

I was just making a throwaway reference to the fact that "Kayfabe" is listed as a trope, and noting that its presence on that sign in the comic wasn't just a random word. I wasn't planning to add anything to the comic's page or whatever.

That would explain why I wasn't at all familiar with the word "courte", despite the fact that my basic written French is usually semi-adequate. Thanks.

We also raid German (and any other language that doesn't duck fast enough), which is whence we got "short". (We also mugged Latin for "curtus", but turned that into "curt".) English spellings are so wonky that it's very unwise to take them as any sort of guide to etymology.

edited 27th Aug '15 11:19:23 AM by Spindriver

court_EN is cour_FR.

It is a coincidence. The English word of similar origins is 'curt'. "False friends" are not uncommon in English, really.

edited 27th Aug '15 11:51:34 AM by Heatth

Inhabited_EN being one of the worst.

edited 27th Aug '15 12:24:38 PM by Medinoc

paired with what?

Given he is from France, I think he is thinking on inhabité(uninhabited). But, It is terrible in Portuguese too, considering our own inabitado (also uninhabited).

Indeed.

"Oh, so inflammable means 'flammable'? Who knew?"

Everyone who ever said "Inflammatory"?

The prefix in- does have that meaning, yes. It's apparently an alternative form of en-, though I'm not sure what the rule is on which one to use, unlike more-than-two-letters prefixes that end with an o where the rule is simply "remove the o if it will precede a vowel".

As anyone who has taken French or many other languages would tell you, false cognates are definitely a thing.

Hell, there's even false cognates between my Nigerian cultural language and Japanese, despite zero shared history.

There's always embarassed and embarazada! I love when english speakers say that.

I only know about that due to a Nova Award for an ad for a pen that told Spanish-speaking readers that "It won't leak in your pocket and impregnate you."

For that matter, half of the contranyms in English are essentially false cognates, having started as two different words from different languages and then eventually standardized such that they are spelled and pronounced the same.

The worst is "Constipação". It means "common cold" in Portuguese, but it sounds like something else in most other European languages.

That, and the German "Na", which means "Yes".

Indeed, that is among the worst. We spell it exactly like that but I am pretty sure it doesn't mean "common cold". It just means constipation over here.

Conversations between Brazilians and Portuguese people can result in the weirdest misunderstanding.

New SDB strip. Amber is clearly of the "everyone should try everything except incest and morris dancing" school.

Similarly, under non-verbal cues, the Indian head gesture of bobbing one's head from side to side to say "yes" can look a lot like a headshake of "no".

Huh. And I hadn't realized that there's a difference between "false friends" and "false cognates". Learned something new.

Huh, I didn't know about that difference either. So, what we were talking about are specifically false friends (though some were false cognates also), right?

edited 28th Aug '15 11:47:02 AM by Heatth

I once spent roughly an hour speaking to a Brazilian girl before she interrupted me to say "'Rapariga' simply means 'girl', right? That's the only way this conversation is making any sense."

(Clarification: "Rapariga" means "prostitute" in parts of Brazil. The girl was right about what the word means in Portugal)

... OK, why did that word acquire that meaning and have it displace the original one in Brazilian culture?

We do have some issues with girls and prostitutes. A puta is also a girl in Portugal, isn't it? In my region, it is how we call prostitutes^note we don't use 'rapariga' over here.

Who the hell knows? Although it should be noted that 'puta' exist in multiple Romance languages, meanign 'whore' in most of them (according to the wiktionary. It etymologically comes from the latin word 'putus', which mean child. Old time people were gross, it seem. Except the Portuguese, they are fine.

edited 29th Aug '15 6:39:21 AM by Heatth

Yay! You guys are fine as well.

Here, puta means [female] prostitute, yes. Rapariga means girl.

Interestingly enough, puto is more ambiguous. Here, it usually means 'little [male] kid', but it is, at times, used as an equivalent of puta (especially when said in frustration or with the intent to insult).

Maybe we should take this to the Languages Are Weird thread?

I'm given to understand that French has the same problem with "jeune fille" (young girl) where it's generally used in association with prostitution. Of course, I also remember that being mentioned in a rantish article about how United States French is archaic 19th century French that has nothing to do with modern Parisian French, so they might have been exaggerating. I suspect that the change comes as the result of a euphemism becoming the standard word.