False friend
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In linguistics, a false friend is a word in a different language that looks or sounds similar to a word in a given language, but differs significantly in meaning. Examples of false friends include English embarrassed and Spanish embarazado 'pregnant'; English parents versus Portuguese parentes and Italian parenti (both meaning 'relatives'); English demand and French demander 'ask'; and English gift, German Gift 'poison', and Norwegian gift 'married'.
The term was introduced by a French book, Les faux amis: ou, Les trahisons du vocabulaire anglais (False friends, or, the betrayals of English vocabulary), published in 1928.
As well as producing completely false friends, the use of
Definition and origin
False friends are bilingual homophones or bilingual homographs,[3] i.e., words in two or more languages that look similar (homographs) or sound similar (homophones), but differ significantly in meaning.[3][4]
The origin of the term is as a shortened version of the expression "false friend of a translator", the English translation of a French expression (French: faux amis du traducteur) introduced by Maxime Kœssler and Jules Derocquigny in their 1928 book,[5] with a sequel, Autres Mots anglais perfides.
Causes
From the etymological point of view, false friends can be created in several ways.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/86/Cerstve_pecivo-slovakian.jpg/220px-Cerstve_pecivo-slovakian.jpg)
If language A borrowed a word from language B, or both borrowed the word from a third language or inherited it from a common ancestor, and later the word shifted in meaning or acquired additional meanings in at least one of these languages, a native speaker of one language will face a false friend when learning the other. Sometimes, presumably both senses were present in the common ancestor language, but the cognate words took on different restricted senses in Language A and Language B.[6]
In loanwords
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', and has the logical derivative as a verb, meaning 'to make current' or 'to update'. Actualise (or 'actualize') in English means 'to make a reality of'.[7]
The Italian word confetti 'sugared almonds' has acquired a new meaning in English, French and Dutch; in Italian, the corresponding word is coriandoli.[8]
English and Spanish, both of which have borrowed from Ancient Greek and Latin, have multiple false friends, such as:
English | Spanish translation | Spanish | English translation |
---|---|---|---|
actually | en realidad | actualmente | currently |
advertisement | publicidad | advertencia | warning |
bizarre | extraño | bizarro | brave |
English and
In native words
The word friend itself has cognates in the other Germanic languages, but the Scandinavian ones (like
The Estonian and Finnish languages are related, which gives rise to false friends such as swapped forms for south and south-west:[4]
Estonian | Finnish | English |
---|---|---|
lõuna | etelä | south |
edel | lounas | south-west |
Or Estonian vaim 'spirit; ghost' and Finnish vaimo 'wife'; or Estonian huvitav 'interesting' and Finnish huvittava 'amusing'[3] or Estonian koristaja 'a cleaner' and Finnish koristaja 'a decorator'.
A high level of lexical similarity exists between German and Dutch,[10] but shifts in meaning of words with a shared etymology have in some instances resulted in 'bi-directional false friends':[11][12]
German | Dutch | English |
---|---|---|
See | meer | mere (lake) |
Meer | zee | sea |
German | Dutch | English |
---|---|---|
mögen | houden van | like, love |
dürfen | mogen | be allowed to |
wagen | durven | dare |
The meanings could diverge significantly. For example, the Proto-Malayo-Polynesian word *qayam "domesticated animal" became specialized in descendant languages: Malay/Indonesian ayam 'chicken', Cebuano ayam 'dog', and Gaddang ayam 'pig'.[6]
Homonyms
In Swedish, the word rolig means 'fun': ett roligt skämt 'a funny joke', while in the closely related languages Danish and Norwegian it means 'calm' (as in "he was calm despite all the commotion around him"). However, the Swedish original meaning of 'calm' is retained in some related words such as ro 'calmness', and orolig 'worrisome, anxious', literally 'un-calm'.[13] The Danish and Norwegian word semester means term (as in school term), but the Swedish word semester means holiday. The Danish word frokost means lunch, while the Norwegian word frokost and the Swedish word frukost both mean breakfast.
Pseudo-anglicisms
Pseudo-anglicisms are new words formed from English morphemes independently from an analogous English construct and with a different intended meaning.[14]
Japanese is replete with pseudo-anglicisms, known as wasei-eigo 'Japan-made English'.[15][16]
Semantic change
In bilingual situations, false friends often result in a semantic change—a real new meaning that is then commonly used in a language. For example, the Portuguese humoroso 'capricious' changed its meaning in American Portuguese to 'humorous', owing to the English surface-cognate humorous.[citation needed]
The American Italian fattoria lost its original meaning, "farm", in favor 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 became the new signifier for "farm" (Weinreich 1963: 49; see "one-to-one correlation between signifiers and referents").[full citation needed]
Due to the closeness between Italian terra rossa 'red soil' and Portuguese terra roxa 'purple soil',
Quebec French is also known for shifting the meanings of some words toward those of their English cognates, but such words are considered false friends in European French. For example, éventuellement is commonly used as "eventually" in Quebec but means "perhaps" in Europe.
This phenomenon is analyzed by Ghil'ad Zuckermann as "(incestuous) phono-semantic matching".[19]
See also
- Auto-antonym
- Equivalence in language translation
- Etymological fallacy
- False cognate
- False etymology
- Folk etymology
- Linguistic interference (language transfer)
- List of Chinese–Japanese false friends
- Swenglish
References
- ^ "German Loan Words in English". About.com. Archived from the original on 2011-06-07. Retrieved 2014-04-28.
- ^ "Online Etymology Dictionary". etymonline.com. Retrieved 2014-04-28.
- ^ ISBN 978-952-6613-26-0. Retrieved 10 May 2018.
- ^ OCLC 954201320. Retrieved 10 May 2018.
- OCLC 999745586. Archived from the originalon July 9, 2013. Retrieved 21 December 2019.
- ^ a b Austronesian Comparative Dictionary
- ISBN 9783823362500
- ^ "Confetto in Enciclopedia Treccani". Treccani.it. Retrieved 2014-06-23.
- JSTOR 132001.
- ^ "German and Dutch: similar or different?". Language Tsar. 2016-11-17. Retrieved 2018-02-15.
- ^ "valse vrienden – Falsche Freunde". uitmuntend.de (in Dutch and German). Retrieved 2018-02-15.
- ^ "dürfen / müssen / sollen / mögen". nubeterduits.nl (in Dutch). Retrieved 2018-02-15.
- ^ "Orolig". Svenska Akademiens Ordbok [The Swedish Academy's Dictionary] (in Swedish). Vol. 19. Lund: Swedish Academy. 1950. p. spalt O 1337. Retrieved 8 May 2017.
[fsv. oroliker; jfr dan. o. nor. urolig, nor. dial. uroleg, nyisl. órólegur (jfr isl. úróliga, adv.), mlt. unrouwelik, (ä.) t. unruhlich; av O- 1 o. ROLIG, lugn, delvis möjl. avledn. av ORO]
- ISBN 978-3-11-019946-8.
- ^ Ruzhenkova, V.; Platoshina, V.V. (2011). "False friends in converting a text from one script into another". Experientia Est Optima Magistra: Collected Arts.: 126 – via Belgorod State University DSPACE.
- ^ Miller, Laura (1997). "Wasei eigo: English 'loanwords' coined in Japan". The Life of Language: Papers in Linguistics in Honor of William Bright: 123–139 – via ResearchGate.
- ^ "Terra roxa: origens e como cuidar do solo vermelho". Canal Agro Estadão (in Brazilian Portuguese). 7 March 2022. Retrieved 7 May 2023.
- ^ "Conheça as características da terra roxa ou terra vermelha". Canal Rural (in Brazilian Portuguese). 13 December 2014.
- ISBN 978-1-4039-1723-2. Archived from the originalon 2014-02-01. Retrieved 2008-09-17.
External links
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/99/Wiktionary-logo-en-v2.svg/40px-Wiktionary-logo-en-v2.svg.png)
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/df/Wikibooks-logo-en-noslogan.svg/40px-Wikibooks-logo-en-noslogan.svg.png)
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- wikt:Category:False cognates and false friends on Wiktionary
- An online hypertext bibliography on false friends Archived 2007-04-29 at the Wayback Machine
- Spanish/English false friends Archived 2008-05-17 at the Wayback Machine
- French/English false friends Archived 2009-01-29 at the Wayback Machine
- Italian/English false friends
- English/Russian false friends
- English/Dutch false friends
- LanguageTool support for false friends according to rules in this format.
- Die Deutschen und ihr Englisch. The devil lies in the detail (tagesspiegel.de, 2015)
- Der DEnglische Patient – Kolumne von Peter Littger Archived 2016-10-25 at the Wayback Machine (Manager Magazin, 2016)