The idea that a language ends up a lingua franca because of its qualities is simply ridiculous. It's not linguistics, it's empire. It's always empire.
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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The word set has more definitions than any other word in the English language iirc. I'd actually love to hear how each meaning came to be. Whether it's from other languages or just English being what it is.
I've yet to see any of the English haters point out a real (not engineered) language that's more functional. Every language has it's own pitfalls, in its amalgamation of other popular world languages English bridges over many of them.
idk why'd anyone hate English tbh, perfect lingua franca precisely due to its grammatic simplicity and flexibility
Also "false cognates" seems to be either outdated concept or used here as a term that looks scienc-y to make the idea seem more legit, but in modern linguistics it's probably just called homonymy and the words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.
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 perhaps I misunderstood false cognate (from here https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#false_cognate ) :
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.
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
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.
But bank does have at least 2 etymologies.
This is an example. Bank can be the money bank or a bank of a river.
Cool didn't know that, then it looks like DDG ai was right
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."
Always good check them facts
Wouldn't the French escale also have stemmed from the latin scala at some point?
Good call. According to wiki, the French escale is descended from the Latin scala (ladder)
EDIT: I misread. The modern French word escale (port of call) descended from the Latin scala (ladder), but the similar Old French word escale/eschale (hard skin covering) came from the Old High German scala (similar meaning). BUT, the Norse skala (measuring device) mentioned in the meme DID descend from the Latin scala (ladder)!
I was curious. Apparently scale as in scale model also comes from the Latin scala. After learning that I went to OED to learn more...
33 meanings. This is where my journey ends today. 🤣
These comments are the reason why I like Lemmy / the Fediverse so much. Thank you!
Yes. French actually is a 100% successor of the local vulgar latin. There's no "native" French that's somewhere in the bowels of the language; no celtic ("gallicus") roots to be found there.
Few Celtic roots*
For instance char comes from the Celtic carros.
Furthermore French has a strong Frankish influence, hence the name of the language and its relative distance from Italian Spanish or Portuguese which are more directly descended from Latin. But also many other influences. French has a surprising amount of Arabic vocabulary for example, and not just from recent immigration/colonisation.
smale fischis
I like your funny words, magic man
“A frogge biþ a smale beaste wiþ foure leggys”
I love how Middle English sounds so silly. Is it saying the fish has bright silver scales?
That's right. A small fish with red fins and bright silver scales. Spelling wasn't really standardized until the Elizabethan era. People spelled so it could be sounded out.
this is why English is a bad choice for a lingua franca
That conclusion doesn’t follow, unless you further append something like “Lernu Esparonton!” to indicate you have a misguided belief that language needs to make sense to be useful.
You also have the benefit of a language like English able to steal words from all languages in that English has a flexible ruleset to communicate. Your don't have to communicate perfectly in English to communicate in English.
The language made by the Scandics, the Welsh and the Scandic settlers of the Franks. What could go wrong?
Other than it practically being a French creole after a millennia of rule by the Norwegian Frankia settlers, but that would be nitpicking.
Interestingly, I read “scale, scale, and scale” with the same meanings popping in my head in sequence as her explanations were in.
I'm wondering if scale, as in the crud that can build up on certain materials under certain conditions, is simply derived from the fish scale sense. It would seem like it, since it's the 'shell or husk' Otherwise, yay, a fourth meaning!
It's the fish scale meaning. If I could post all of the OED stuff here I would. The sense of flaking from a husk or rind is from the 1450s - onion skin is referenced in this sense. Oxide films like rust date in the 1520s, and scale for tooth tartar is from the 1590s.
Now what about a music scale?
That's probably based on the first definition because you can play either an ascending or descending scale.
Also the music staff kinda looks like a ladder.
That is correct. It's also a very modern sense of the word given the age of the root.
& to this day, folks want to use this bastard language.
Purity bad, bastard best
bastard in the literal sense: borrowed words from other languages, doesn't care about conflicts, thus homophones like these arise.