False friend

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False friends (French: faux amis) are pairs of words or phrases in two languages or dialects (or letters in two alphabets)[citation needed] that look or sound similar, but differ in meaning. The term should be distinguished from "false cognates", which are similar words in different languages that appear to have a common historical linguistic origin (whatever their current meaning) but actually do not. As well as complete false friends, 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.

Contents
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1 Implications 2 Special case: language varieties o 2.1 British and American English 3 Causes o 3.1 Shared etymology o 3.2 Homonyms o 3.3 Homoglyphs o 3.4 Pseudo-anglicisms 4 Semantic change 5 Examples 6 See also 7 References 8 External links

[edit] Implications
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 identify the words wrongly due to linguistic interference. For this reason, teachers sometimes compile lists of false friends as an aid for their students. 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,[1] Greek for "ill-sounding".[2]

[edit] Special case: language varieties

[edit] British and American English

See also: List of words having different meanings in British and American English: A L and List of words having different meanings in British and American English: MZ 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 separated by a common language".[3] For example, in the UK, to "table" a motion means to place it on the agenda (to bring it to the table for consideration), while in the US it means exactly the opposite "to remove it from consideration" (to lay it aside on the table rather than hold it up for consideration).[4]

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

[edit] 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. For example, the words preservative (English), prservatif (French), Prservativ (German), prezervativ (Romanian, Czech, Croatian), preservativ (Slovenian), preservativo (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese), prezerwatywa (Polish), "prezervativ" (Russian, Serbian) and preservatiu (Catalan) are all derived from the Latin word praeservativum. But 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", 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".[5] Demand in English and demande in French or domanda in Italian are representative of a particularly treacherous sort of false friend, in which despite a common origin the words have differently shaded meanings. The French and Italian homologues simply mean "request", not a forceful requirement. This led to several historic misunderstandings, such as in Canada, the failing of the Meech Lake Accord where Quebec constitutional requests were interpreted as demands.[citation needed] In Spanish demandar may mean "to request", but its normal meaning is "to sue".

The word friend itself has cognates in the other Germanic languages; but the Scandinavian ones (like Swedish frnde, Danish frnde) mean "relative" and nothing else. The common original word had both the meanings "friend" and "relative", but lost the first sense completely in the Scandinavian languages, and mostly lost the sense of "relative" in English. (The plural "friends" still but rarely may be used for "kinsfolk", as in the Scottish proverb Friends agree best at a distance, quoted in 1721.) The Italian word magazzino, French magasin, Dutch magazijn, and Russian (magazin), is used for a depot, store, or warehouse. In English the word magazine has also the meaning of "periodical publication". The word "magazine" has the same meaning in French. In Serbian there are two similar words: magacin, representing the former, and magazin representing the latter meaning. To add confusion, there is an extra meaning of magazine (firearms) in several languages (with accordingly different spellings). (Note, however, that the term "powder magazine", a store for gunpowder, as e.g. in the town of Williamsburg, Virginia, restored to its colonial form, would be well understood by current English speakers, though recognized as an archaicism. Gift originally had the same meaning in English and German. In Old High German and Middle High German Gift was the term for an "object that is given". Although it had always included a euphemistic meaning for "poison" ("being given"), over the following centuries it gradually suffered a full semantic change to the sole present German meaning "poison". It is still reflected in the German term for the English word dowry = Mitgift, das Mitgegebene, "that which is given" (with the wedding).[6] In Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, gift means "poison" but also "married". In Dutch, "gift" means a gift, but "gif" and "giftig" mean poison and poisonous respectively. The latter two meanings also apply for the Afrikaans language, spoken in Southern Africa, which originated from Old Dutch amongst others. Cafeteria means "dining hall" in English; but cafetera means "coffeehouse" in Spanish and Portuguese, whereas cafetria means "fringe benefit" in Hungarian and cofetrie means "sweetshop" in Romanian. Stano means "cellar" in Spanish, but sto means "attic" in Portuguese. Normal in French implies technical conformance (to technical standards), it means "It is as it's supposed to be", while normal in English implies social conformance (to social norms). This is why the now-archaic normal school (from the French cole normale) is so confusing to present-day English speakers; it was a place where people received standardized training in how to teach children, not an institution where social deviants learned how to behave normally. The same divergence also presented a problem for the International Organization for Standardization (Organisation internationale de normalisation) at its founding in 1947; it settled on the short name ISO as a compromise between IOS and OIN. The Finnish and Estonian languages are both part of the non-Indo-European Finno-Ugric languages; they share a similar grammar as well as several individual words, though sometimes as false friends: e.g. the Finnish word for 'south', etel is close to the Estonian

word edel, but the latter means south-west. However, the Estonian word for south, luna, is close to the Finnish word lounas, which means south-west.

[edit] 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 and Dutch Rede (= "speech", often religious in nature) (hence thelred the 'Unready' would not heed the speech of his advisors, and the word 'Unready' is cognate with the Dutch word "Onraad" meaning trouble, danger), 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 "a good song." In English, bra is short for the French brassire, 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 languages Danish and Norwegian it means "calm" (as in "he was calm despite all the furore around him"). This can sometimes cause confusion: a Swede exclaiming "It'll be fun!" will have a Dane thinking "How boring".[citation needed]

[edit] Homoglyphs
For example, Latin P came to be written like Greek rho (written but pronounced [r]), so the Roman letter equivalent to rho was modified to R to keep it distinct. An Old and Middle English letter has become a false friend in modern English: the letters thorn () and eth () were used interchangeably to represent voiced and voiceless dental fricatives now written in English as th (as in "thick" and "the"). Though the thorn character (whose appearance was usually similar to the modern "p") was most common, the eth could equally be used. Due to its similarity to an oblique minuscule "y", an actual "Y" is substituted in modern pseudo-old-fashioned usage as in "Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe"; the first word means and should be pronounced "the", not "ye" (archaic form of "you"). Homoglyphs occur also by coincidence. For example, Finnish tie means "road"; the pronunciation is [tie], unlike English [tai], which in turn means "or" in Finnish.

[edit] Pseudo-anglicisms
Pseudo-anglicisms 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"). In the SeSotho group of languages spoken in South Africa pushback refers to a combed back hair style, commonly worn by black women with chemically straightened hair; and stop-nonsense refers to pre-fabricated concrete slabs used as fencing.

[edit] Semantic change

In bilingual situations, false friends often result in a semantic changea 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." "Corn" was originally the dominant type of grain in a region (indeed "corn" and "grain" are themselves cognates from the same Indo-European root). It came to mean usually wheat in the British Isles, but maize in North America. The 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".[7] This phenomenon is analysed by Ghil'ad Zuckermann as "(incestuous) phono-semantic matching".

[edit] Examples

False friends in a Dutch advertisement actually meaning "Mummy, that one, that one, that one ..." "Please.", In English this could easily sound as though the child is telling her mother to die, although not pronounced the same way.

Since English, German and Dutch have many of 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 (e.g. word/Wort/woord, book/Buch/boek, house/Haus/huis, water/Wasser/water ...). However, similar words with a different meaning are also quite common (e.g., German 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.").[8] Another example is the word gift, which in English and Dutch means a "present" but in German and the Scandinavian languages means "poison". 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 meaningin "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. The German word Land is the exact cognate of English land but it carries many political, constitutional, and historical meanings absent from the English term (among other things a constituent state of the German Federal Republic, historically a principality of the Holy Roman Empire, but also "rural" as opposed to "urban", etc. - most of these meanings are borne by the Anglo-Norman word country in English). The title of the well-known Italian novel Il Gattopardo was rendered in English as "The Leopard", in which the translator was led astray by a false friend; Italian gattopardo, while being the cognate of "leopard", in fact refers to other felines (the American ocelot, the African serval and an extinct type of Italian wildcat). False friends can be especially confusing when meanings of words in one language are similar to those in another, especially when context cannot help in resolving the confusion. For example, German and Scandinavian "Hund" and Dutch "Hond" are the cognates of English "hound", but whereas hund and hond refer to dogs in general, in English the sense has been narrowed to dogs used for hunting. Conversely, the German "Dogge" and French "dogue" refer to a specific kind of dog rather than to dogs in general. And French "librairie" is the cognate of "library" but refers to a bookshop. Another Spanish/English false friend is "embarrassed/embarazado". Where "embarrassed" in English means approximately "ashamed", a similar-sounding Spanish word, "embarazada", means "pregnant". Both derive from old Castillan-Portuguese "embarazar", meaning impede, hinder, obstruct. In Spanish it was then used as euphemism for "pregnant" (she was "embarrassed" -hindered- by her pregnancy) and that became the primary meaning. In English, the meaning was taken from being "embarrassed", ill at ease, hindered, by shame. In Portuguese, "embaraar" has a meaning similar to the English. (In medical English, however, "embarrass" retains a meaning much more general than in the language as a whole: essentially, to diminish.)

In Spanish "substituir" means "replace" so that "substituir A por B" means "replace A with B" or "substitute B for A", the opposite of what it apparently might look like. Another example is the English pair of words "assist" and attend", whose meanings in Spanish are just the opposite. So, "attending a course" is "asistir un curso" and "assist someone" is "atender a alguien". A Spanish/Maltese false friend is guapo/a and gwapp/a respectively. While the former means "handsome", the latter gives an ironic sense of "clumsy". 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 meaningEnglish being a notable exception (e.g. French and Dutch concurrent and Russian konkurent translate as "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, while in Russian takes one more meaning and refers to contest . 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" (which is also another meaning of the Spanish's asistir). In Catholic literature in English, the term "assist at Mass" has been used to mean "to attend Mass" due to a mistranslation of the French "assister la messe" which means "to attend Mass". Despite the above, the noun form in English ("attendant") is someone who waits on another, generally with menial tasks and in a temporary fashion, as on an airplane or hotel; whereas 'assistant' implies a longer-term, higher level, and often contractual (=employment), relationship.