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'False friends' (or ''faux amis'') are pairs of words in two languages (or letters in two alphabets) that look and/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 (regardless of meaning) but actually do not. The phrase ''false cognates'' is also sometimes inaccurately used to mean ''false friends'', and vice versa.

Contents

Implications

Causes

Examples

See also

References

External links

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 the students are likely to misidentify the words due to linguistic interference. Since false friends are a common problem for language learners, teachers sometimes compile lists of false friends as an aid for their students.
A special kind of false friend can occur when two speakers each speak different varieties of the same language. Speakers of British English and American English sometimes have this problem, and this was once humorously described by George Bernard Shaw as that '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. See List of words having different meanings in British and American English.
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 (κακεμφάτον), Greek for "ill-sounding".

Causes

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

★ 'Borrowing'. If Language A borrowed a word from Language B, then in one language the word shifted in meaning or had more meanings added, a native speaker of one language will face a false friend when learning the other.
:: For example, the words ''preservative'' (English), ''préservatif'' (French), ''Präservativ'' (German), ''prezervativ'' (Romanian), ''preservativo'' (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese) and ''prezerwatywa'' (Polish) are all derived from the Latin word ''praeseruatiuum''. However, in all of these languages except English, the predominant meaning of the word has become condom, while the most common French word for "preservative" is now ''conservateur'' (which confusingly also means conservative in the political sense). ''Actual'' has a different meaning in English from what it means in other European languages, where it means ''current'' or ''up-to-date'', and has the logically derivative verb ''to actualise'' meaning ''to make current'' or ''to update''.

★ 'Homonyms'. In certain cases, false friends evolved separately in the two 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 ''Rede'' (= ''speech''), while English ''rat'' for the rodent has its German cognate ''Ratte''.

★ 'Different alphabets' / 'Homographs'.
:: For example, Roman "P" came to be written like Greek "Rho" (written "Ρ" but pronounced ), so the Roman letter equivalent to rho was modified to "R" to keep it distinct.

★ 'Pseudo-anglicisms'. These 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 telephone.
::Japanese is replete with pseudo-anglicisms, known as ''wasei-eigo'' ("Japan-made English"). A particularly complicated one is the word ''naitā'' which means night-time baseball game. It is derived from the American ''twi-nighter'' which is short for ''twi-night doubleheader'', baseball slang meaning two games played by the same teams in a single day, one in the afternoon and the other in the evening, usually starting at twilight and continuing into the night. The Japanese ''naitā'' is strictly Japanese baseball slang, and is unknown to American baseball fans. In English, nitre (of very similar pronunciation) is a name for potassium nitrate.

★ 'Idioms'. Some phrases commonly used in one culture and language may lose context when translated to another language, conveying a totally different meaning.
::For example ''I'll call you back'' means that I will call you at a later time, in reply to your call, or in a later attempt to call. However, translating literally to Spanish would end up in ''Te llamaré para atrás'', which actually means: ''I'll call you backwards''. The Spanish phrase is used frequently in Puerto Rico, and can be confusing when heard by other Spanish-speakers. The correct translation would be ''Te volveré a llamar''.

Examples

The Parker Pen Company may have experienced a case of such confusion when they were trying to translate their slogan "It won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you" for the Latino market. As they mistakenly thought ''embarazar'' meant ''to embarrass'', the Spanish slogan was proudly displayed across Latin communities as: "It won't leak in your pocket and ''impregnate'' you" (''to embarrass'' in Spanish is "avergonzar"). (Serva 2003)
Words like "hot dog" can come out lost in translation, and especially since words carry different connotations in different areas; Richard Lederer, an author and professor of English, reports going to Germany and asking a vendor for a ''heißen Hund'' (a literal translation of "hot dog"). The vendor broke out laughing, for in German, ''heißer Hund'' suggests a dog in heat (Germans use the English term "hot dog" as a loan phrase).

Also, since English and German have 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 (i.e. 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 cognate')^[1]. This often causes some confusion for native speakers of one language learning the other language. Another example is the word 'gift', which in English means 'present' but in German means 'poison'.
An example in Spanish/English is 'red', with different pronunciation in both languages. This obviously refers to the colour in English but means 'net' in Spanish, and therefore gives rise to such phrases as ''red inalámbrica'' (wireless network).
This phenomenon may seem most-famously illustrated by the rumored attempt to translate the Biblical quote, "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak," from English into a non-English language (in one version, Russian), and then back into English, producing the result, "The wine is strong, but the meat is rancid." However, what this actually demonstrates is merely the danger of not choosing the right idiomatic words or definitional choices out of several, when applicable, in translating.
Swedish/English false friends were used intentionally for comedic purposes in the song "Tänk att män som han kan finnas" from the Swedish musical ''Kristina från Duvemåla''. Three Swedish immigrants and an American pastor try to communicate in their respective languages. The humor lies in the verses, in which English and Swedish lines are connected by false friend pairs at the beginning and end of each line, such as "If you're hungry there's more of the deer that I 'caught'." - "Han är 'kåt'! (He is horny!)"
For an extensive list of false friends see List of false friends.

See also

★ List of false friends

★ List of words having different meanings in British and American English

★ List of false friends between Swedish and English

References

1. Geoff Parkes, Alan Cornell, 1992, "NTC's Dictionary of German False Cognates", National Textbook Company, NTC Publishing Group


★ Sandy Serva, iLanguage: Translations for Global Research, Jan 2003, Vol. 26, Issue 1, p 51. [1]

External links

★ An online hypertext bibliography on false friends

★ German/English false friends

★ Spanish/English false friends

★ French/English false friends

★ Liste de faux amis et anglicismes

★ Japanese/English false friends

★ Hungarian/English false friends

★ List of German/English false friends

★ (a comprehensive collection at Wikibooks)

★ Chinese/Japanese false friends

★ Where among others the various slogans (including English/German false friend "Mist") is discussed