False friends thread

[Ares Land]

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."

I agree, it's entirely normal. But you still need to be aware of them and learn the common one, because learning a foreign language is hard and sometimes you forget vocabulary.

As an example, it's often tempting, if you forgot or never learned a word, to just fake it, take a word from you native language, adapt it as best you can, cross fingers and hope it works. This actually works surprisingly often.
Once French president Hollande, who kind of forgot how to translate 'vous n'êtes pas obligé de...' ("you don't have to") just decided to fake it, and calqued it as 'you're not obligated to' -- which works.
French speakers who forgot the word 'fan', will calque 'ventilateur' and end up with ventilator.
Or, wanting to translate 'embarrassé', will use 'embarrassed' which actually works for English, whereas using the same trick in Spanish won't.
(French vs. Italian is the trickiest situation, I believe, because most of the vocabulary is cognate, with identical meanings most of the time; the exceptions are all the more trickier. I was a bit puzzled by the brand name 'Poltrone Sofa' because poltron in French means cowardly; turns out in Italian poltrone means lazy.)

That's why they compile lists of false friends and make you learn them at school.

[Moose-tache]

OK, so false friends are any two words that are not identical? That simply doesn't work. It would be foolish to say helicopter and hélicoptère are false friends, but they meet your definition: they are indeed both words, and they are not 100% identical in their spelling, pronunciation, semantics, and usage.

Again, the fact that you need to memorize that a ventilator is used in hospitals and a ventilateur is used domestically isn't unusual; that's how most words work, and nobody expects to transliterate a word without risking an error of usage or connotation. To be false friends, they have to do more than present the ordinary amount of non-identicalness.

Another illustration:
1) face vs la face: not false friends. That's a normal amount of semantic difference. The fact that they are not identical is unexceptional. If we call these false friends, then the hundreds of thousands of Latinate words in English, Arabic words in Farsi, Chinese words in Korean, Sanskrit words in Javanese, etc., etc., would every last one of them be false friends. Every borrowed word in any language on Earth would be one half of a false friend pair.
2) vague vs la vague: yes false friends. This is a whacky amount of semantic difference for two homographs, especially considering that the English word is borrowed from French. A reasonable person, who understands that examples like 1 exist and adjusts their expectations accordingly, would still draw a much closer connection between these two words than is warranted.

[Ares Land]

I don't know, if a British or an American doctor were to ask for a ventilateur in a hospital, they'd be met with some confusion -- or a fan, but hospitals are air conditioned these days. So I'd guess the semantic difference is pretty big.

Much more so than hélicoptère vs. helicopter! Or face vs. face (which in some cases, namely those where we use visage, would sound weird but would always be understood.)

The way I see it, if you're likely to cause a misunderstanding, then it's a false friend.

(I'm not entirely sure vague counts as a false friend. vague isn't used as a noun in English, and as an adjective, the meaning is close to identical between French and English.)

[Raphael]

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.

Congratulations, that in itself already makes you smarter than the translators of some professionally done translations I've read.

[Ares Land]

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.

Congratulations, that in itself already makes you smarter than the translators of some professionally done translations I've read.

I have similar experiences with translations and I guess even a good translator can make a mistake. (Especially in pre-Internet days, when they couldn't quickly google unfamiliar idioms!)

The translator of Dune evidently stumbled over a bit of dialogue (quoting from memory) 'Is it a Bene Gesserit thing? It's a female thing.' (female/femelle being kind of false friends -- it's indeed femelle if you're talking about animals but féminin if referring to humans)

This ended up as 'c'est une chose femelle' which makes absolutely no sense at all in French but has a vaguely deep, cryptic connotation that matches the book perfectly.
Given Frank Herbert's style, I think the translator often had hard choices to make. (Was that supposed to mean something or was it just word salad that sounds deep? Is it some kind of idiom or is it pseudo-mystical gibberish I shouldn't bother too much with?)

[Kuchigakatai]

A pretty well-known group of false friends is English "actually" vs. Spanish actualmente / French actuellement (both meaning 'currently, at the present time'). I once read an article about the difficulties of translating "world English", when politicians insist in using English while knowing it imperfectly, and this came up as an example as Spanish/French-speaking politicians often use "actually" with the meaning the similar word has in Spanish/French.

One that's a bit less well-known is English "eventually" vs. Spanish eventualmente ('now and then', i.e. happening during "events" as it were) vs. French eventuellement ('potentially, possibly'). These days the anglicism usage exists too, I hear it among Spanish speakers I know who're very familiar with English, and it's definitely there in Quebec French at least.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

A pretty well-known group of false friends is English "actually" vs. Spanish actualmente / French actuellement (both meaning 'currently, at the present time'). I once read an article about the difficulties of translating "world English", when politicians insist in using English while knowing it imperfectly, and this came up as an example as Spanish/French-speaking politicians often use "actually" with the meaning the similar word has in Spanish/French.

You do encounter this meaning in the English word in some texts from the 1700s.

[Raphael]

I once read an article about the difficulties of translating "world English", when politicians insist in using English while knowing it imperfectly, and this came up as an example as Spanish/French-speaking politicians often use "actually" with the meaning the similar word has in Spanish/French.

When L1 German speakers whose English isn't that good try to speak or write English, one common mistake is that they use the English word "make" as a literal translation of German "machen", in contexts where L1 English speakers would use "do".

And then there was the case of... (old ZBB drama behind the fold)

More: show

Back on one of the previous ZBBs, there was a French guy, libertarian, very, let's call it "passionate", about his libertarianism, very blunt about different political positions, who eventually got himself banned. Anyway, at one point, during an argument, I indicated that he might be engaging in a bit of projection. He responded, basically, that of course he was engaging in projection, and, in fact, projection was a major part of how he had become a libertarian in the first place. Now, of course, if taken at face value, that would be a pretty embarrassing admission to make; but I've suspected ever since (though I didn't say it at the time) that he didn't actually have any clue what the English word "projection", in a psychological context, means, and that he just assumed as a matter of course that it means the same as some similar-looking or similar-sounding French word or expression.

[Ares Land]

Not quite a false friend I believe, but an interesting case still: as far as I know projection - in the psychological sense - has about the same meaning in both languages... but I believe it's used a lot more in English then it is in French; so it's entirely possible for an educated French speakers not to know the word, or to use it wrong.

[Linguoboy]

I once read an article about the difficulties of translating "world English", when politicians insist in using English while knowing it imperfectly, and this came up as an example as Spanish/French-speaking politicians often use "actually" with the meaning the similar word has in Spanish/French.

When L1 German speakers whose English isn't that good try to speak or write English, one common mistake is that they use the English word "make" as a literal translation of German "machen", in contexts where L1 English speakers would use "do".

This is common among L2 speakers of most European languages, where one verb typically does the work of both "do" and "make" in English.

Of course, I see the opposite happen among L2 speakers of German who are native in English: They freely use tun not realising that it has a slightly more formal connotation in Standard German (e.g. "Was tust du hier?" instead of "Was machst du (denn) hier?"). Similarly, they map sprechen to "talk" and use it where reden would be more natural.

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."

I agree, it's entirely normal. But you still need to be aware of them and learn the common one, because learning a foreign language is hard and sometimes you forget vocabulary.

If you want to be pedantic (and, judging by their posting history, Moose-tache does), sure, no two words between different languages are ever exact equivalents. But there's definitely a cline here from "same denotation but minimally different connotations/associations" to "utterly different in meaning". Where I see language paedagogues focus is not on pairs like ventilator/ventilateur where the choice might sound odd but would still most likely be understood in context but cases like blame/blamieren where it can completely change the meaning of an utterance.

[Ares Land]

. Where I see language paedagogues focus is not on pairs like ventilator/ventilateur where the choice might sound odd but would still most likely be understood in context

Oh, that's funny. I didn't think it'd be understood in context.
(I think in the opposite direction - English to French - it wouldn't.)

[hwhatting]

Well, as linguoboy said, it's a cline, so different people may put the border from where it's a "false friend" at different places.

[Kuchigakatai]

I feel I definitely wouldn't understand the ventilator/ventilateur pair either...

[WeepingElf]

I didn't know until recently, but apparently, the English word ventilator denotes a piece of medical equipment, not an electric fan like French ventilateur or German Ventilator.

[Emily]

moose-stache, i don't think that any difference in meaning constitutes a false friend, but i think you're misinterpreting what people are saying if that's how you're presenting it. of course words aren't going to have identical meanings between languages; the range of meanings that "house" has are different from the range of meanings "Haus" has, but they aren't false friends, because the primary, basic meaning for each is the same (a building for people to live in), and the other meanings are secondary. so even though some of those meanings might lead to confusion, the most common uses of the two respective words is basically the same and the words aren't false friends. where the difference in ventilator/ventilateur comes in is that, even though the basic meanings may be related (devices that act upon air in some way), they don't line up. in english, a "ventilator" is a medical device first and foremost, or else a specialized apparatus for changing out the air in a building or inducing airflow in an engine or whatever. no monolingual english speaker encountering the word "ventilator" in a foreign text is going to picture an ordinary desk fan. same thing with the previously cited publicist/publizist: the basic meaning is fundamentally different (promoter/PR agent vs essayist/columnist), and i think it's a stretch to say they're "semantically related"—at least in any way that is helpful for a language learner in either direction. this is why they're false friends: because the basic meaning is different and a likely source of confusion

[Linguoboy]

. Where I see language paedagogues focus is not on pairs like ventilator/ventilateur where the choice might sound odd but would still most likely be understood in context

Oh, that's funny. I didn't think it'd be understood in context.
(I think in the opposite direction - English to French - it wouldn't.)

I can't really speak to that, but I think in English--outside of medical contexts--it probably would. In addition to referring to artificial respirators, a "ventilator" is also used for large industrial fans.

I guess that's another factor which makes the definition fuzzy: It's very context-dependent. I've even had that issue with regionalisms in English sometimes. In some contexts, it's a mere curiosity; in others, it's a frustrating five-minute discussion trying to determine what someone is actually asking for.

[Raphael]

Now I remember reading news reports during the height of the COVID crisis and asking myself what hospitals needed all those electric fans for... I figured out what they meant pretty quickly, though.

[Ryusenshi]

English dungeon (underground prison) and French donjon (castle keep).

Interestingly, Dungeons & Dragons became Donjons et Dragons in French, which is technically a mistranslation... but sounds better than any alternative, being an alliteration and a rhyme. So, French gamers also use the word donjon for the gaming meaning of dungeon (any indoor area with monsters and treasure).

I was actually tripped up by this dual definition. The series Le Donjon de Naheulbeuk started as an audio adventure, and doesn't really describe how the titular donjon looks. I was so used to the gaming meaning of donjon that I imagined it was an underground place. But when it was later adapted into a comic book, I was surprised to see that it is, actually, a tower.

[Kuchigakatai]

One that's a bit funny is "preservative" (mineral or chemical that preserves food) vs. Spanish preservativo / French préservatif 'condom'.

[Travis B.]

One that's a bit funny is "preservative" (mineral or chemical that preserves food) vs. Spanish preservativo / French préservatif 'condom'.

On that note, for an interdialectal English example, consider an NAE rubber (a condom) versus an EngE rubber (an eraser).