False friend

File:False friends, who and where.svg

An example of false friends in German and English

Template:Sidebar with collapsible lists 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 ('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 friends 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.

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 (Template:Langx) introduced by Maxime Kœssler and Jules Derocquigny in their 1928 book, with a sequel, .

Causes

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

Shared etymology

File:Cerstve pecivo-slovakian.jpg

An example of a West Slavic shared etymology; in Czech and Slovak, means 'fresh baked goods', whereas in Polish, means 'stale bread', while in Ukrainian, () means 'hardened cookie (bakery)', while 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.

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'.

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:

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:

Estonian	Finnish	English
		south
		south-west

Or Estonian ('spirit' or 'ghost') and Finnish ('wife'); or Estonian ('a cleaner') and Finnish ('a decorator').

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
	meer	mere 'lake'
		sea

Note that die See means 'sea', and thus is not a false friend.

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 ('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

External links

• wikt:Category:False cognates and false friends on Wiktionary
• An online hypertext bibliography on false friends Template:Webarchive
• Spanish/English false friends Template:Webarchive
• French/English false friends Template:Webarchive
• 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 Template:Webarchive (Manager Magazin, 2016)