False friend

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False friends (or faux amis) are pairs of words in two languages or dialects (or letters in two alphabets) that look and/or sound similar, but differ in meaning.

False cognates, by contrast, are similar words in different languages that appear to have a common historical linguistic origin (regardless of meaning) but actually do not.

Contents

[edit] Implications

See also: List of words having different meanings in British and American English

Both false friends and false cognates can cause difficulty for students learning a foreign language, particularly one that is related to their native language, because students are likely to misidentify the words due to linguistic interference. Because false friends are a common problem for language learners, teachers sometimes compile lists of false friends as an aid for their students.

One kind of false friend can occur when two speakers speak different varieties of the same language. Speakers of British English and American English sometimes have this problem, which was alluded to in George Bernard Shaw's statement "England and America are two countries divided by a common language." For example, in the UK, to "table" a motion means to place it on the agenda, while in the U.S. it means exactly the opposite —"to remove it from consideration".

Comedy sometimes includes puns on false friends, which are considered particularly amusing if one of the two words is obscene; when an obscene meaning is produced in these circumstances, it is called cacemphaton (κακέμφατον), Greek for "ill-sounding."

[edit] Causes

From the etymological point of view, false friends can be created in several ways:

  • Borrowing. If Language A borrowed a word from Language B, then in one language the word shifted in meaning or had more meanings added, a native speaker of one language will face a false friend when learning the other.
For example, the words preservative (English), préservatif (French), Präservativ (German), prezervativ (Romanian, Czech, Croatian), preservativo (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese), prezerwatywa (Polish), Презерватив "Preservativ" (Russian) and preservatiu (Catalan) are all derived from the Latin word præservativum. However, in all of these languages except English, the predominant meaning of the word is now condom.
Actual, which in English is usually a synonym of "real", has a different meaning in other European languages, in which it means "current" or "up-to-date" (aktuell in German and actuel French) and has the logical derivative as a verb aktualisieren (German), actualiser (French) meaning "to make current" or "to update". "Actualise" in English means "to make a reality of".
Demand in English and demande in French are representative of a particularly treacherous sort of false friend, in which – despite a common origin – the words not only have different, but almost precisely opposite meanings. In French, a demande is a "request", not a forceful requirement.
Magazine in English and магазин (magazin) in Russian (from the French word magasin of the same meaning) mean "publication" and "shop/store", respectively.
Gift originally had the same meaning in English and German. About thousand years ago, this word was sometimes used as euphemism for "poison" in German. During the centuries following, by a process of "pejoration", this meaning of "Gift" became predominant. Today, "poison" is the only meaning for German "Gift", except in the word Mitgift ("dowry") which in German means das Mitgegebene, "that which is given with (the wedding)".
  • Homonyms. In certain cases, false friends evolved separately in the different languages. Words usually change by small shifts in pronunciation accumulated over long periods and sometimes converge by chance on the same pronunciation or look despite having come from different roots.
For example, German Rat (pronounced with a long "a") (= "council") is cognate with English "read" and German Rede (= "speech") (hence Ethelred the 'Unready' would not heed the speech of his advisors), while English "rat" for the rodent has its German cognate Ratte. In another example, the word bra in the Swedish language means "good", as in the following sentence: "this is a good song." In English, bra is short for the French brassière, which is an undergarment that supports the breasts. The full English spelling, brassiere, is now a false friend in and of itself (the modern French term for brassiere is soutien-gorge).
In Swedish, the word rolig means "fun" (as in "It was a fun party"), while in the closely related language Danish it means "calm" (as in "he was calm despite all the furor around him"). This can sometimes cause confusion when talking about future events - a Swede exclaiming "It'll be fun!" will have a Dane thinking "How boring".
For example, Latin P came to be written like Greek rho (written Ρ but pronounced [r]), so the Roman letter equivalent to rho was modified to R to keep it distinct.
  • Pseudo-anglicisms. These are new words formed from English morphemes independently from an analogous English construct and with a different intended meaning.
For example, in German: Oldtimer refers to an old car (or antique aircraft) rather than an old person, while Handy refers to a mobile phone.
Japanese is replete with pseudo-anglicisms, known as wasei-eigo ("Japan-made English").

[edit] Examples

The Parker Pen Company may have experienced a case of such confusion when they were trying to translate their slogan "It won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you" for the Latino market. As they mistakenly thought embarazar meant "to embarrass", the Spanish slogan was proudly displayed across Latin communities as: "It won't leak in your pocket and "impregnate" you" ("to embarrass" in Spanish is avergonzar).[1]

Also, since English and German have the same etymological origins, there actually are a great number of words in both languages that are very similar and do have the same meaning (i.e. word/Wort, book/Buch, house/Haus, water/Wasser, ...). However, similar words with a different meaning are also quite common (e.g., bekommen means "to get", that is, "to come by", not "to become", and is thus a false friend, which could lead a German English learner to utter an embarrassing sentence like: "I want to become a beefsteak.")[2]. Another example is the word gift, which in English means a "present" but in German and the Scandinavian languages means "poison" (and also "married").

English "knight" and German Knecht are clearly related (though pronounced differently), and originally had also a similar meaning, denoting a person rather low in the social scale. However, the English one underwent a great upward mobility during the Middle Ages, becoming associated with the aristocracy, while its German equivalent retained the humble meaning of "servant". (To make the confusion even greater, where Knecht received a military meaning - in "Landsknecht" - it denoted foot soldiers rather than cavalry). The German word for English "knight" is Ritter, which is the cognate of English "rider" - but which carries vast social implications absent from the English word.

An example in Spanish/English is red, with different pronunciation in both languages. This refers to the colour in English but means "net" in Spanish, and therefore gives rise to such phrases as red inalámbrica (wireless network).

The Latin root of concur has several meanings; "to meet (in battle)" and "to meet (in agreement)". In many European languages, words derived from this root take after the first meaning - English being a notable exception (i.e. French concurrent is a "competitor" in English). Additionally in some languages a "concourse" (Swedish konkurs, Finnish konkurssi) takes its meaning from "concourse of debtors", that is, it means bankruptcy.

The French verb attendre means "to wait", yet an English speaker learning French might expect the English equivalent to be "attend", which means "to participate in" or "to go to". However, the verb "attend" in English is translated as assister in French and asistir in Spanish, both of which could be further misinterpreted as equivalent to the English "assist", which means "to help". Both cases are examples of false friends.

[edit] False friends resulting in a semantic change in the standard language

In bilingual situations, false friends often result in a real new meaning that is commonly used in a language. For example, Portuguese humoroso "capricious" changed its referent in American Portuguese to "humorous" owing to the English surface-cognate "humorous". American Yiddish kórņ "rye" and American Norwegian korn "grain" came to refer to "maize" because of the cognate American English corn. American Italian fattoria lost its original meaning "farm" in favour of "factory" owing to the phonetically similar surface-cognate English "factory" (cf. Standard Italian fabbrica "factory"). Instead of the original fattoria, the phonetic adaptation American Italian farma (Weinreich 1963: 49) became the new signifier for "farm" – see "one-to-one correlation between signifiers and referents".[3] This phenomenon is analysed by Ghil'ad Zuckermann as "(incestuous) phono-semantic matching".

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Sandy Serva, iLanguage: Translations for Global Research, Jan 2003, Vol. 26, Issue 1, p 51.
  2. ^ Geoff Parkes, Alan Cornell, 1992, "NTC's Dictionary of German False Cognates", National Textbook Company, NTC Publishing Group
  3. ^ See p. 102 of Zuckermann, Ghil'ad 2003, ‘‘Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew’’, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, (Palgrave Studies in Language History and Language Change, Series editor: Charles Jones). ISBN 1-4039-1723-X.

[edit] External links

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