False friend

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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 embarazada 'pregnant'; English parents versus Portuguese parentes and Italian parenti (both meaning 'relatives'); English demand and French demander 'ask'; and English gift, German Gift 'poison', and Norwegian gift 'married'.

Contents

The term was introduced by a French book, Les faux amis: ou, Les trahisons du vocabulaire anglais (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, angst 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". [1] Also, gymnasium 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'. [2]

Definition and origin

False friends are bilingual homophones or bilingual homographs, [3] i.e., words in two or more languages that look similar (homographs) or sound similar (homophones), but differ significantly in meaning. [3] [4]

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 (French : faux amis du traducteur) introduced by Maxime Kœssler and Jules Derocquigny in their 1928 book, [5] with a sequel, Autres Mots anglais perfides.

Causes

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

Shared etymology

An example of a West Slavic shared etymology; in Czech and Slovak cerstve pecivo means 'fresh bread', whereas in Polish czerstwe pieczywo means 'stale bread', while in Ukrainian cherstve pechivo (cerstve pecyvo) means 'hardened cookie (bakery)', while in Russian chyorstvy means "stale" again Cerstve pecivo-slovakian.jpg
An example of a West Slavic shared etymology; in Czech and Slovak čerstvé pečivo means 'fresh bread', whereas in Polish czerstwe pieczywo means 'stale bread', while in Ukrainian черстве печиво (čerstve pečyvo) means 'hardened cookie (bakery)', while in Russian chyorstvy 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. [6]

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'. [7]

The Italian word confetti 'sugared almonds' has acquired a new meaning in English, French and Dutch; in Italian, the corresponding word is coriandoli. [8]

English and Spanish, both of which have borrowed from Ancient Greek and Latin, have multiple false friends, such as:

EnglishSpanish translationSpanishEnglish translation
actuallyen realidadactualmentecurrently
advertisementpublicidadadvertenciawarning
bizarreextrañobizarrobrave

English and Japanese also have diverse false friends, many of them being wasei-eigo and gairaigo words. [9]

In native words

The word friend itself has cognates in the other Germanic languages, but the Scandinavian ones (like Swedish frände, Danish frænde) 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 closely related, which gives rise to false friends such as swapped forms for south and south-west: [4]

EstonianFinnishEnglish
lõuna etelä south
edel lounas south-west

Or Estonian vaimu 'spirit; ghost' and Finnish vaimo 'wife'; or Estonian huvitav 'interesting' and Finnish huvittava 'amusing'. [3]

A high level of lexical similarity exists between German and Dutch, [10] but shifts in meaning of words with a shared etymology have in some instances resulted in 'bi-directional false friends': [11] [12]

GermanDutchEnglish
Seemeermere (lake)
Meerzeesea
GermanDutchEnglish
mögenhouden vanlike, love
dürfenmogenbe allowed to
wagendurvendare

The meanings could diverge significantly. For example, the Proto-Malayo-Polynesian word *qayam "domesticated animal" became specialized in descendant languages: Malay/Indonesian ayam 'chicken', Cebuano ayam 'dog', and Gaddang ayam 'pig'. [6]

Homonyms

In Swedish, the word rolig means 'fun': ett roligt skämt '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 ro 'calmness', and orolig 'worrisome, anxious', literally 'un-calm'. [13] The Danish and Norwegian word semester means term (as in school term), but the Swedish word semester means holiday. The Danish word frokost means lunch, while the Norwegian word frokost and the Swedish word frukost 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. [14]

Japanese is replete with pseudo-anglicisms, known as wasei-eigo 'Japan-made English'. [15] [16]

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 humoroso 'capricious' changed its meaning in American Portuguese to 'humorous', owing to the English surface-cognate humorous.[ citation needed ]

The American Italian fattoria lost its original meaning, "farm", in favor 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 became the new signifier for "farm" (Weinreich 1963: 49; see "one-to-one correlation between signifiers and referents").[ full citation needed ]

Due to the closeness between Italian terra rossa 'red soil' and Portuguese terra roxa 'purple soil', Italian farmers in Brazil used terra roxa to describe a type of soil similar to the red Mediterranean soil. [17] The actual Portuguese word for "red" is vermelha. Nevertheless, terra roxa and terra vermelha are still used interchangeably in Brazilian agriculture. [18]

This phenomenon is analyzed by Ghil'ad Zuckermann as "(incestuous) phono-semantic matching". [19]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cognate</span> Words inherited by different languages

In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Because language change can have radical effects on both the sound and the meaning of a word, cognates may not be obvious, and it often takes rigorous study of historical sources and the application of the comparative method to establish whether lexemes are cognate. Cognates are distinguished from loanwords, where a word has been borrowed from another language.

False cognates are pairs of words that seem to be cognates because of similar sounds and meaning, but have different etymologies; they can be within the same language or from different languages, even within the same family. For example, the English word dog and the Mbabaram word dog have exactly the same meaning and very similar pronunciations, but by complete coincidence. Likewise, English much and Spanish mucho came by their similar meanings via completely different Proto-Indo-European roots, and same for English have and Spanish haber. This is different from false friends, which are similar-sounding words with different meanings, and may or may not be cognates.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Engrish</span> Slang term for mistakenly broken English

Engrish is a slang term for the inaccurate, poorly translated, nonsensical or ungrammatical use of the English language by native speakers of other languages. The word itself relates to Japanese speakers' tendency to struggle to pronounce the English and distinctly arising from the fact Japanese has only one liquid phoneme, but its definition encompasses many more errors. Terms such as Japanglish, Japlish, Jinglish, or Janglish are more specific to Japanese Engrish. The related Japanese term wasei-eigo refers to pseudo-anglicisms that have entered everyday Japanese.

In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, “to calque” means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new lexeme in the target language. For instance, the English word "skyscraper" has been calqued in dozens of other languages, combining words for "sky" and "scrape" in each language, as for example, German: Wolkenkratzer, Portuguese: Arranha-céu. Another notable example is the Latin weekday names, which came to be associated by ancient Germanic speakers with their own gods following a practice known as interpretatio germanica: the Latin "Day of Mercury", Mercurii dies, was borrowed into Late Proto-Germanic as the "Day of Wōđanaz" (Wodanesdag), which became Wōdnesdæg in Old English, then "Wednesday" in Modern English.

A pseudo-anglicism is a word in another language that is formed from English elements and may appear to be English, but that does not exist as an English word with the same meaning.

An anglicism is a word or construction borrowed from English by another language.

Ciao is an informal salutation in the Italian language that is used for both "hello" and "goodbye".

Folk etymology – also known as (generative) popular etymology, analogical reformation, (morphological)reanalysis and etymological reinterpretation – is a change in a word or phrase resulting from the replacement of an unfamiliar form by a more familiar one through popular usage. The form or the meaning of an archaic, foreign, or otherwise unfamiliar word is reinterpreted as resembling more familiar words or morphemes.

Gairaigo is Japanese for "loan word", and indicates a transcription into Japanese. In particular, the word usually refers to a Japanese word of foreign origin that was not borrowed in ancient times from Old or Middle Chinese, but in modern times, primarily from English, Portuguese, Dutch, and modern Chinese dialects, such as Standard Chinese and Cantonese. These are primarily written in the katakana phonetic script, with a few older terms written in Chinese characters (kanji); the latter are known as ateji.

In Modern English, the name of Sweden is derived from 17th century Middle Dutch and Middle Low German. In Old English, the country was named Swēoland and Swēorīċe ; the latter is cognate with Old Norse Svíaríki. Anglo-Norman of the 12th and 13th centuries used Suane and Swane. In Scots, Swane and Swaine appear in the 16th century. Early Modern English used Swedeland.

Wasei-eigo are Japanese-language expressions that are based on English words, or on parts of English phrases, but do not exist in standard English, or do not have the meanings that they have in standard English. In linguistics, they are classified as pseudo-loanwords or pseudo-anglicisms.

Dunglish is a popular term for an English spoken with a mixture of Dutch. It is often viewed pejoratively due to certain typical mistakes that native Dutch speakers, particularly those from the Netherlands, make when speaking English. The term is first recorded in 1965, with other colloquial portmanteau words including Denglish, Dutchlish (1986), and Dinglish (2003).

In etymology, two or more words in the same language are called doublets or etymological twins or twinlings when they have different phonological forms but the same etymological root. Often, but not always, the words entered the language through different routes. Given that the kinship between words that have the same root and the same meaning is fairly obvious, the term is mostly used to characterize pairs of words that have diverged at least somewhat in meaning. For example, English pyre and fire are doublets with merely associated meanings despite both descending ultimately from the same Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word *péh₂ur.

Many Japanese words of Portuguese origin entered the Japanese language when Portuguese Jesuit priests and traders introduced Christian ideas, Western science, technology and new products to the Japanese during the Muromachi period.

<i>-ing</i> English language suffix

-ing is a suffix used to make one of the inflected forms of English verbs. This verb form is used as a present participle, as a gerund, and sometimes as an independent noun or adjective. The suffix is also found in certain words like morning and ceiling, and in names such as Browning.

Wasei-kango are those words in the Japanese language composed of Chinese morphemes but invented in Japan rather than borrowed from China. Such terms are generally written using kanji and read according to the on'yomi pronunciations of the characters. While many words belong to the shared Sino-Japanese vocabulary, some kango do not exist in Chinese while others have a substantially different meaning from Chinese; however some words have been borrowed back to Chinese.

Present-day Irish has numerous loanwords from English. The native term for these is béarlachas, from Béarla, the Irish word for the English language. It is a result of language contact and bilingualism within a society where there is a dominant, superstrate language and a minority substrate language with few or no monolingual speakers and a perceived "lesser" status.

References

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  3. 1 2 3 Korpela, Jukka K. (12 August 2014). Introduction to Finnish. Helsinki: Suomen E-painos Oy. p. 35. ISBN   978-952-6613-26-0 . Retrieved 10 May 2018.
  4. 1 2 Knospe, Sebastian; Onysko, Alexander; Goth, Maik (26 September 2016). Crossing Languages to Play with Words: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Berlin: De Gruyter. p. 116. ISBN   978-3-11-046560-0. OCLC   954201320 . Retrieved 10 May 2018.
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  6. 1 2 Austronesian Comparative Dictionary
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  12. "dürfen / müssen / sollen / mögen". nubeterduits.nl (in Dutch). Retrieved 2018-02-15.
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  17. "Terra roxa: origens e como cuidar do solo vermelho". Canal Agro Estadão (in Brazilian Portuguese). 7 March 2022. Retrieved 7 May 2023.
  18. "Conheça as características da terra roxa ou terra vermelha". Canal Rural (in Brazilian Portuguese). 13 December 2014.
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