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Also “false cognates” seems to be either outdated concept or used here as a term that looks scienc-y to make the idea seem more legit, but in modern linguistics it’s probably just called homonymy and the words are called homonyms. It is also possible for a word to be both homonymous and polysemous but I don’t remember a good example in English. DDG ai summary gave me the word “bank” as an example, but it looks like as a noun it just has different meanings, not two different etymologies, so it’s just polysemy, not homonymy. The shorter the word, the higher the chance it is homonym or has multiple meanings/definitions.

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chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Hmm, the only time I learned about false cognates was when learning high school Spanish, so I assumed it meant two words that sound similar in different languages but have different meanings, rather than homonyms in the same language.

Example: embarrassed and embarazado

Looking the above example up for spelling, I see it’s called a false friend, and while it is a false cognate, false cognates can be in the same language too(from here en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#false_co… ) :

false cognate A word in a language that bears a phonetic and semantic resemblance to a word in another or the same language but is not etymologically related to it and thus not a true cognate. Examples include English day/Portuguese dia, German Feuer/French feu (both meaning “fire”), Malay dua/Sanskrit द्व (dva) (both meaning “two”), and English dog/Mbabaram dog. Compare false friend. false friend A word in a language that bears a phonetic resemblance to a word in another language, often because of a common etymology, but has a different meaning. Examples include English parent/Portuguese parente (“relative”) and English embarrassed/Spanish embarazada (“pregnant”). Compare false cognate.

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- ewigkaiwelo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Yeah I’ve looked into wiki page for “false cognates” after leaving that reply, it would make sense to have a name for a situation where words from different languages sound similar and have similar definitions but are not etymologically related, but according to the wiki false cognates also can be words from the same language and I just don’t see the need to call them false cognates in this case, to my understanding they are called homonyms if they are identical in spelling and pronunciation but differ in etymology/definition, or homophones if they sound the same but are spelled differently. Vsauce made an awesome video on this topic a while ago.
  
  False friends are for translators/interpreters, they are referred to as “translators’ false friends” because people make mistakes when making translations while having insufficient experience, like that example that you give with embarrassed and embarazada
  
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  - zikzak025@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I’m not a linguistics expert and this is just me offering an unsolicited layman’s opinion, but perhaps the nuance comes from whether or not one might still conceive of the words being related despite the acknowledged difference in definition?
    
    For example, “bat” (the animal) and “bat” (the implement) are homonyms that are used to describe two clearly different things. But maybe one might think of “scale” being connected between its various uses when it is not. “Scale” (the measuring tool) uses plates which are similar to the flat plates of fish scales. Or that to “scale” a distance is like measuring a “scale” of height. Something like that.
    
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Wizard_Pope@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
But bank does have at least 2 etymologies.

This is an example. Bank can be the money bank or a bank of a river.

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- ewigkaiwelo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Cool didn’t know that, then it looks like DDG ai was right
  
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  - Wizard_Pope@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Well even when I read your reply I immediately thought of the 2 different meanings and said to myself “surely those cannot have the same etimology.”
    
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    ewigkaiwelo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Always good check them facts
    
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