False friend

In linguistics, a false friend is either of two words in different languages that look or sound similar, but differ significantly in meaning. Examples include English ''embarrassed'' and Spanish ''embarazada'' '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 loanwords often results in the use of a word in a restricted context, which may then develop new meanings not found in the original language. For example, ''angst'' means 'fear' in a general sense (as well as 'anxiety') in German, but when it was borrowed into English in the context of psychology, its meaning was restricted to a particular type of fear described as "a neurotic feeling of anxiety and depression". Also, ''gymnasium'' meant both 'a place of education' and 'a place for exercise' in Latin, but its meaning was restricted to the former in German and to the latter in English, making the expressions into false friends in those languages as well as in Ancient Greek, where it started out as 'a place for naked exercise'.

Definition and origin

False friends, or bilingual homophones are words in two or more languages that look or sound similar, but differ significantly in meaning.

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,, referring to with a sequel, ''Autres Mots anglais perfides''.

Causes

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

Shared etymology

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 got different restricted senses in Language A and Language B.

''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'.

The word ''friend'' itself has cognates in the other Germanic languages; but the Scandinavian ones (like Swedish ''frände'', Danish ''frænde'') predominantly mean 'relative'. The original Proto-Germanic word meant simply 'someone whom one cares for' and could therefore refer to both a friend and a relative, but lost various degrees of the 'friend' sense in Scandinavian languages, while it mostly lost the sense of 'relative' in English. (The plural ''friends'' is still, rarely, used for "kinsfolk", as in the Scottish proverb ''Friends agree best at a distance'', quoted in 1721.)

The Estonian and Finnish languages are closely related, which gives rise to false friends such as swapped forms for south and south-west:

Or Estonian ''vaimu'' 'spirit; ghost' and Finnish ''vaimo'' 'wife'; or Estonian ''huvitav'' 'interesting' and Finnish ''huvittava'' 'amusing'.

A high level of lexical similarity exists between German and Dutch, but shifts in meaning of words with a shared etymology have in some instances resulted in 'bi-directional false friends':

The Italian word ''confetti'' "sugared almonds" has acquired a new meaning in English, French and Dutch; in Italian, the corresponding word is ''coriandoli''.

English and Spanish, both of which have borrowed from Ancient Greek and Latin, have multiple false friends, such as:

English and Japanese also have diverse false friends, many of them being ''wasei-eigo'' and ''gairaigo'' words.

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'. 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, the Norwegian word ''frokost'' means breakfast.

Pseudo-anglicisms

Pseudo-anglicisms are new words formed from English morphemes independently from an analogous English construct and with a different intended meaning.

Japanese is replete with pseudo-anglicisms, known as ''wasei-eigo'' ("Japan-made English").

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 referent in American Portuguese to 'humorous', owing to the English surface-cognate ''humorous.''

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").

This phenomenon is analyzed by Ghil'ad Zuckermann as "(incestuous) phono-semantic matching".

See also

* Auto-antonym
* Equivalence in language translation
* Etymological fallacy
* False cognate
* False etymology
* Folk etymology
* Linguistic interference (language transfer)
* Swenglish

References

External links

* wikt:False cognates and false friends on Wiktionary

An online hypertext bibliography on false friends






Italian/English false friends




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Der DEnglische Patient – Kolumne von Peter Littger
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