False friends thread

[Otto Kretschmer]

List here the false friends you know

[Ares Land]

The list of English-to-French false friends is probably too long to post here, but I'm taking the opportunity to complain that I still trip up over concurrence~compétition and librairie~library~bibliothèque.

That's what you get when you work in IT -- French reborrowed the technical meanings of concurrence and library from English.

[Otto Kretschmer]

Polish puszka (a can) and Russian пушка (a cannon)

Both from German Büchse

[WeepingElf]

German Genie 'genius' vs. English genie

The words are also unrelated, as the German word is from Latin via French, and the English one from Arabic.

[Raphael]

German Genie 'genius' vs. English genie

The words are also unrelated, as the German word is from Latin via French, and the English one from Arabic.

This reminds me - German genial 'adjective form of "genius"' vs English genial

[vegfarandi]

Icelandic setning (clause) and English sentence. I don't think they're cognates but they sound a lot alike and trip people up all the time.

Sentence in Icelandic is málsgrein (lit. matter/language branch), paragraph is efnisgrein (lit. material branch).

[Otto Kretschmer]

Chinese Ta pronoun
Polish ta ( demonstrative fem. sg,)

[WeepingElf]

Chinese Ta pronoun
Polish ta ( demonstrative fem. sg,)

Doesn't this belong to the False cognates thread?

[Raholeun]

These come from Dutch and Afrikaans respectively:

D. epos (epic poem) and A. e-pos (electronic mail)
D. aftrekplek (meeting spot for illicit prostitution) and A aftrekplek (parking spot)

There are many more.

[Otto Kretschmer]

Russian okhotnik (a hunter)
Polish ochotnik (a volunteer)

Polish kucać (to crunch)
Silesian kucać (to cough,)

Polish koło (a wheel)
Silesian koło (a bicycle)

[Moose-tache]

Stumbled across this one recently, sorry if it's been said before.

Khmer has borrowed a word for 1,000,000 from Thai, lan. This is often (as in English) preceded by the native word for "one." The result is that 1,000,000 in Khmer is muəj.lien

[Raphael]

English publicist someone who professionally handles publicity-related matters for famous people, vs.

German Publizist a professional writer of non-fiction texts that are usually, on their own, shorter than book-length, such as essays, columns, op-ed pieces, or reviews.

(I haven't read that many translated texts recently, so I don't know if it's still as bad as it's used to be, but when I was growing up, it was almost as if there was a legal requirement that if you wanted to be a professional translator of English texts into German, you had to be completely unfamiliar with the concept of False Friends.)

[Moose-tache]

English publicist someone who professionally handles publicity-related matters for famous people, vs.

German Publizist a professional writer of non-fiction texts that are usually, on their own, shorter than book-length, such as essays, columns, op-ed pieces, or reviews.

(I haven't read that many translated texts recently, so I don't know if it's still as bad as it's used to be, but when I was growing up, it was almost as if there was a legal requirement that if you wanted to be a professional translator of English texts into German, you had to be completely unfamiliar with the concept of False Friends.)

If they're from the same root, and semantically related, are they false friends? Those kind of just look like friends.

[hwhatting]

Said the publicist to the Publizist, let's just be friends...

[WeepingElf]

English publicist someone who professionally handles publicity-related matters for famous people, vs.

German Publizist a professional writer of non-fiction texts that are usually, on their own, shorter than book-length, such as essays, columns, op-ed pieces, or reviews.

(I haven't read that many translated texts recently, so I don't know if it's still as bad as it's used to be, but when I was growing up, it was almost as if there was a legal requirement that if you wanted to be a professional translator of English texts into German, you had to be completely unfamiliar with the concept of False Friends.)

If they're from the same root, and semantically related, are they false friends? Those kind of just look like friends.

False friends are quite often cognate, as is the case here. For another example I recently posted on the CBB, see English ventilator vs. German Ventilator 'electric fan'. Clearly the same Latin origin, yet different things.

[Raphael]

If they're from the same root, and semantically related, are they false friends? Those kind of just look like friends.

False friends are quite often cognate, as is the case here. For another example I recently posted on the CBB, see English ventilator vs. German Ventilator 'electric fan'. Clearly the same Latin origin, yet different things.

Or even the perhaps most famous pair of false friends, Spanish embarazada 'pregnant' vs English embarrassed. They're apparently etymologically related, and as for semantic relations, I guess under certain circumstances, being embarazada can be quite embarrassing.

[Ares Land]

English publicist someone who professionally handles publicity-related matters for famous people, vs.

German Publizist a professional writer of non-fiction texts that are usually, on their own, shorter than book-length, such as essays, columns, op-ed pieces, or reviews.

(I haven't read that many translated texts recently, so I don't know if it's still as bad as it's used to be, but when I was growing up, it was almost as if there was a legal requirement that if you wanted to be a professional translator of English texts into German, you had to be completely unfamiliar with the concept of False Friends.)

Additionally a publiciste in French is a lawyer specializing in public law.

If they're from the same root, and semantically related, are they false friends? Those kind of just look like friends.

Unless usage of "false friends" is different from French faux ami (which in turn, would make false friend a false friend!) a lot of false friends are from the same root and semantically related. I always understood the expression to mean they're false friends to the learner.

(gift vs. German Gift, affaire vs affair, to demand vs. demander...)

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I think introduce and introduire might be worth a mention.

[Raphael]

Only partly False Friends: English veteran and German Veteran both mean someone who served in a military, but the English word can also mean someone who simply worked in a specific field or profession for a long time, which the German word can't mean.

[Moose-tache]

I agree with what's been said here, but hear me out. My understanding of false friends is that they are deceptively similar in form, but the form doesn't actually help you.

If I know the word ventilator, and I encounter Ventilator in the wild, of course I'm going to assume that the two words don't perfectly match; that's how cognates and borrowings usually work. I would assume that Ventilator is a German noun that has something to do with mechanically moving air, and I would be right. It's not unusual that they don't refer to exactly the same machine. Meanwhile, if I know the word embarrassed, and I encounter emberazada in the wild, literally any guess at all that I made about the word, other than the fact that it's a participle/adjective, would be false. Any information I bring with me from English could only serve to drive me away from the correct meaning. To me, that's the defining feature of false friends. Any pair of related words in different languages will have subtly different meanings. That's just normal, and doesn't really cry out for a special descriptive term like "false friends."