False friends (or faux amis) are pairs of words in two languages or dialects (or letters in two alphabets) that look 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 (whatever their current meaning) but actually do not.
As language evolves, meanings change, and words from the past become false friends although in the same language. There are many examples in Shakespeare[1].
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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. As 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".[2]
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".
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.
From the etymological point of view, false friends can be created in several ways:
Since English and German have some 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, 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.")[5]. Another example is the word gift, which in English 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 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.
The German word "Land", spelled exactly like the English one (though pronounced differently) carries many political, constitutional and historical meanings absent from the English term (at present a constituent state of the German Federal Republic, in the past a principality of the Holy Roman Empire).
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 most confusing exactly when the meaning in the one language has diverged only slightly from the one in the other. For example, German "Hund" and Dutch "Hond" are the cognates of English "Hound", but they refer to all dogs, whether or not used for hunting. 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".
A Spanish/Maltese false friend is guapo/a and gwapp/a respectively. While the former means "handsome", the latter gives an ironic sense of "not good at what they do".
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 (e.g. 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.
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."
"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 England, but maize in North America, although the American usage is becoming dominant in the UK.
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".[6]
This phenomenon is analysed by Ghil'ad Zuckermann as "(incestuous) phono-semantic matching".
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