false friends

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 ('pregnant'); English ''parents'' versus Portuguese and Italian (the latter two both meaning 'relatives'); English ''demand'' and French ('ask'); and English ''gift'', German ('poison'), and Norwegian (both 'married' and 'poison').

The term was introduced by a French book, (''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, 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, meant both 'a place of education' and 'a place for exercise' in Latin, but its meaning became 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 are bilingual homophones or bilingual homographs, i.e., words in two or more languages that look similar (''homographs'') or sound similar (''homophones''), 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 () introduced by Maxime Kœssler and Jules Derocquigny in their 1928 book,, referring to with a sequel, .

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 took on different restricted senses in Language A and Language B.

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'.

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

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 and words.

In native words

The word ''friend'' itself has cognates in the other Germanic languages, but the Scandinavian ones (like Swedish , Danish ) 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 it lost various degrees of the 'friend' sense in the 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 related, which gives rise to false friends such as swapped forms for south and south-west:

Or Estonian ('spirit' or 'ghost') and Finnish ('wife'); or Estonian ('a cleaner') and Finnish ('a decorator').

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':

Note that ''die See'' means 'sea', and thus is not a false friend.

The meanings could diverge significantly. For example, the Proto-Malayo-Polynesian word ('domesticated animal') became specialized in descendant languages: Malay/ Indonesian ('chicken'), Cebuano ('dog'), and Gaddang ('pig').Austronesian Comparative Dictionary
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Homonyms

In Swedish, the word means 'fun': '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 'calmness', and 'worrisome, anxious', literally 'un-calm'. The Danish and Norwegian word means term (as in school term), but the Swedish word means holiday. The Danish word means lunch, while the Norwegian word and the Swedish word 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.

Japanese is notable for its pseudo-anglicisms, known as ('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 ('capricious') changed its meaning in American Portuguese to 'humorous', owing to the English surface-cognate ''humorous''.

The American Italian lost its original meaning, "farm", in favor of "factory", owing to the phonetically similar surface-cognate English ''factory'' (cf. Standard Italian , 'factory'). Instead of the original , the phonetic adaptation American Italian became the new signifier for "farm" (Weinreich 1963: 49; see "one-to-one correlation between signifiers and referents").

Due to the closeness between Italian ('red soil') and Portuguese 'purple soil', Italian farmers in Brazil used to describe a type of soil similar to the red Mediterranean soil. The actual Portuguese word for "red" is . Nevertheless, ' and ' are still used interchangeably in Brazilian agriculture.

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, 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".

See also

* Auto-antonym
* Dunglish
* Equivalence in language translation
* Etymological fallacy
* False cognate
* False etymology
* Folk etymology
* Linguistic interference (language transfer)
* List of Chinese–Japanese false friends
* Spanglish
* Swenglish

References

External links

* wikt:False cognates and false friends on Wiktionary

An online hypertext bibliography on false friends








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(tagesspiegel.de, 2015)

Der DEnglische Patient – Kolumne von Peter Littger
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1920s neologisms