False friend
In linguistics, false friends are words in different languages that look or sound similar, but differ significantly in meaning. An example is the English embarrassed and the Spanish embarazada, the word parents and the Portuguese parentes and Italian parenti, or the word sensible, which means reasonable in English, but sensitive in French, German, Italian and Spanish.
The term originates from a book by French linguists describing the phenomenon, which was translated in 1928 and entitled, "false friend of a translator".
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 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, gymnasium meant both 'a place of education' and 'a place for exercise' in Latin, but its meaning was 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 Greek, where it started out as 'a place for naked exercise'.
Definition and origin
False friends, or bilingual homophones are words in two or more languages that look or sound similar, but differ significantly in meaning.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 linguists Maxime Kœssler and Jules Derocquigny in their 1928 book, with a sequel, Autres Mots anglais perfides.
Causes
From the etymological point of view, false friends can be created in several ways.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.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 in English means 'to make a reality of'.
The word friend itself has cognates in the other Germanic languages; but the Scandinavian ones 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 lost various degrees of the 'friend' sense in Scandinavian languages, while it mostly lost the sense of 'relative' in English.
The Estonian and Finnish languages are closely related, which gives rise to false friends:
| Estonian | Finnish | English |
| ' | ' | south |
| ' | ' | south-west |
Or Estonian vaimu ‘spirit; ghost’ and Finnish vaimo ‘wife’, ; or Estonian huvitav ‘interesting’ and Finnish huvittava ‘amusing’.
A high level of lexical similarity exists between German and Dutch, but shifts in meaning of words with a shared etymology have in some instances resulted in 'bi-directional false friends':
| German | Dutch | English |
| See | meer | lake |
| Meer | zee | sea |
In Belgium, similarities between Dutch and French words often lead to confusion when several different meanings of the same word are mixed up and thus mistranslated. In satirical sketch comedy Sois Belge et tais-toi!, performed by Joël Riguelle in 2009, the following examples are given:
| French | Dutch |
| bureau | bureau "desk" or kantoor "office" |
| tasse | kop "teacup; head" or tas "teacup; bag" |
| sacoche | sacoche or handtas "handbag" or zak "bag, sack, pouch, pocket" |
| poche | zak "bag, sack, pouch, pocket" |
The Italian word confetti ‘sugared almonds’ has acquired a new meaning in English, French and Dutch; in Italian, the corresponding word is coriandoli.
English and Spanish, both of which have borrowed from Greek and Latin, have multiple false friends, such as:
-Sp. darse cuenta - Engl. realize / Sp. realizar - Engl. carry out
-Sp. realmente - Engl. actually / Sp. actualmente - Engl. currently
-Sp. publicidad - Engl. advertisement / Sp. advertencia - Engl. warning.
-Sp. extraño - Engl. bizarre / Sp. bizarro - Engl. brave.
English and Japanese also have diverse false friends, many of them being wasei-eigo and gairaigo words.
Homonyms
In Swedish, the word rolig means 'fun': ett roligt skämt, while in the closely related languages Danish and Norwegian it means 'calm'. However, the Swedish original meaning of 'calm' is retained in some related words such as ro, 'calmness', and orolig, 'worrisome, anxious', literally 'un-calm'. The Danish and Norwegian word semester means term, but the Swedish word semester means holiday. The Danish word frokost means lunch, the Norwegian word frokost means breakfast.In French, the word refers to the head of a boar, while in German :de:Hure|Hure means prostitute.
Pseudo-anglicisms
s are new words formed from English morphemes independently from an analogous English construct and with a different intended meaning.Japanese is replete with pseudo-anglicisms, known as wasei-eigo.
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 changed its referent in American Portuguese to 'humorous', owing to the English surface-cognate humorous.The American Italian fattoria lost its original meaning 'farm' in favor of 'factory' owing to the phonetically similar surface-cognate English factory. Instead of the original fattoria, the phonetic adaptation American Italian farma became the new signifier for 'farm'.
This phenomenon is analyzed by Ghil'ad Zuckermann as " phono-semantic matching".