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https://www.ethnologue.com/guides/how-many-languages

Is it possible that there are so many languages in the world, the written words can be same in more than one language having different meanings?

In that case Google translator will detect the text in multiple languages?

I mean the same word written in multiple languages having different meanings.

Note: In English language we have the same word could be having different meanings. A word in english could also be in French or German or Italian etc languages having different meanings.

Is this possible ?

Prashant Akerkar
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1 Answers1

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  • Single words in the same language can have more than one meaning ie polysemy. For example 'post' has a lot of distinct meanings in English.

  • Single words can appear in two different languages and have the same meaning by coincidence ('bad' in English and Hindi) or by borrowing ('alcohol' in English and Arabic) or by having a common ancestor language (hand in English and German).

  • Single words can appear in two different languages with different meanings. They can be close but non-identical meanings ie false friends or it can be a coincidence. I don't think there's a special term for this beyond 'coincidence'. The English word 'gift' when in German 'Gift' means poison. Another example is:

The word 'leer' means:

  • English - to glance at in a menacing manner
  • German - empty (not full)
  • Spanish - to read

If you look at some words in Wiktionary, which collects word meanings for a string for -all- languages that use that word, there are many with more than one language.

So, yes, the written words can be same in more than one language having different meanings.

One could conceivably have a sentence in one language that could be very very similar in another language (English Frisian)

Frisian: Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.

English: Butter, bread, and green cheese is good English and good Fries

Also a sentence could mean something entirely different but the longer the sentence the more difficult it would be (that sounds like a very difficult puzzle).

The way that Google translate does language detection is (to over simplify considerably) by probabilities of appearance and co-occurrence (probably using the specific technique of Naive Bayes). If the collection of words in the written phrase are mostly from one language, it figures that language is the one intended. If you put in words from different languages, the language detection will be difficult (if not impossible) for machine or human.

Mitch
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  • Thank you Mitch. Will it be a challenging task to compile a False Friends Dictionary? – Prashant Akerkar Aug 06 '21 at 06:51
  • Can this Dictionary assist the Google translator to detect multiple languages if the word exists in them with the meanings? – Prashant Akerkar Aug 06 '21 at 06:58
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    Re compiling a 'false friends' dictionary - Yes, it would be challenging to create a -comprehensive list of words, given two languages, that have shared or near spelling that have slightly or totally different meanings. The difficulty in creating such a dictionary automatically is that the definitions can be close in meaning but hardly match in syntax or word choice. But if you pick two very common languages the foreign language teaching community usually produces various lists of common false friends in their language learning material. Google for "'false friends' language1 language2". – Mitch Aug 06 '21 at 12:58
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    Re 'assist google translate': technically most likely there would be no utility in compiling such a wordlist -for automatic translation - I'm not sure why the translation method would care about false friends... if you give it the word 'Gift' without choosing a language, you might calculate that it's 50-50 chance (German vs English), but if there is a German word also to be translated, you'd guess that monolingual is more likely and that both are German. Would false friend be involved? – Mitch Aug 06 '21 at 13:03
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    For fun there's the complication that the false friend in one language is much more prevalent in one language than the other and that might change probabilities. – Mitch Aug 06 '21 at 13:05
  • Thanks Mitch for your assistance. – Prashant Akerkar Aug 06 '21 at 14:52
  • Can we apply Mathematics here for searching the common words in Three Sets as a example?. Set A consists of all the words in English. Set B consists of all the words in French. Set C consists of all the words in German. Set A intersection Set B will give common words in English and French. Set A intersection Set C will give common words in English and German. Set B intersection Set C will give common words between French and German. The common words found are the False Friends. Can this be a suitable computer program algorithm for tracing false friends and assisting Google translation program? – Prashant Akerkar Aug 06 '21 at 15:00
  • Let us continue this discussion in chat. – Prashant Akerkar Aug 06 '21 at 15:01
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org › wiki › I... Web results Intersection (set theory) - Wikipedia – Prashant Akerkar Aug 06 '21 at 15:06