thumb|An example of false friends in German and English
In linguistics, a false friend is a word or letter 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 friend words 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. False friend letters are homographic graphemes (written characters) that differ significantly in pronunciation.
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, with a sequel, .
Sister alphabets like Ukrainian Cyrillic have homographic false friend letters that misdirect pronunciation by visually matching heterophonic Latin letters in both its upright ⟨прямий, pryamyy⟩ and in its italicized 'cursive' ⟨курсивний, kursyvnyy⟩ or ⟨письмівка, pys’mivka⟩ forms:
alt=Handwritten Ukrainian alphabet|420x420px|Ukrainian letters Г, Д, И, Й, М, Т, and Ц i
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center" border=0 cellpadding=4 cellspacing=1 style="padding:0 .5em .2em; border:1px solid #999; margin:1em 0;"
|+ Visual false friend letters of Ukrainian
|-
! scope="row" | Upright form
|| в
|| г
|| д
|| и
|| і
|| л
|| н
|| п
|| р
|| с
|| т
|| у
|| х
|- style="font-family:Vollkorn,FreeSerif,Cambria,'Times New Roman','Nimbus Roman No9 L','Century Schoolbook L','Trebuchet MS','URW Bookman L','URW Chancery L','URW Palladio L',Teams,serif; font-size:large; text-align:center; " lang="uk"
!lang="en"| «Cursive»
|| В
|| г
|| д
|| и
|| І
|| л
|| н
|| п
|| р
|| с
|| т
|| у
|| х
|-
! scope="row" | False „friend“
|| 𝐵
|| 𝚤
|| ℊ
|| 𝑢
|| 𝐽
|| 𝒾
|| 𝐻
|| 𝑛
|| 𝑝
|| 𝑐
|| 𝑚
|| 𝑦
|| 𝑥
|-
! scope="row" | True ⟨sound⟩
|| v
|| h
|| d
|| y
|| i
|| ℓ
|| n
|| p
|| r
|| s
|| t
|| u
|| kh
|-
! scope="row" | IPA /phone/
|| ʋ
|| ɦ
|| d
|| ɪ̈
|| i
|| l
|| n
|| p
|| r
|| s
|| t
|| u
|| x
|}
- Note: 'Cursive' г, д, and л tend to incorrectly display their non-Ukrainian variants on many platforms as an artifact of official linguistic prohibitions during Soviet digitization.
Causes
From the etymological point of view, false friends can be created in several ways.
Shared etymology
thumb|An example of a West Slavic shared etymology. In Czech and Slovak, means 'fresh baked goods', in Polish, means 'stale bread', in Ukrainian, () means 'hardened cookie (bakery)', and in Russian, means "stale" again.
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.
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:
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!English
!Spanish translation
!Spanish
!English translation
|-
|actually
|
|
|currently
|-
|advertisement
|
|
|warning
|-
|bizarre
|
|
|brave
|}
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: but shifts in meaning of words with a shared etymology have in some instances resulted in 'bi-directional false friends':
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!German
!Dutch
!English
|-
|
|meer
|mere (lake)
|-
|
|
|sea
|}
Note that the Low German die See means 'sea', and thus is not a false friend.
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!German
!Dutch
!English
|-
|
|
|like
|-
|
|
|be allowed to
|-
|
|
|dare
|}
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').
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 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 ('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:Category:False cognates and false friends on Wiktionary
- An online hypertext bibliography on false friends
- Spanish/English false friends
- French/English false friends
- Italian/English false friends
- English/Russian false friends
- English/Dutch false friends
- LanguageTool support for false friends according to rules in this format.
- Die Deutschen und ihr Englisch. The devil lies in the detail (tagesspiegel.de, 2015)
- Der DEnglische Patient – Kolumne von Peter Littger (Manager Magazin, 2016)