false friend

English

WOTD – 4 May 2007

Etymology

Calque of French faux-ami, from the longer phrase faux amis du traducteur (“false friends of a translator”), first used by Maxime Kœssler and Jules Derocquigny in 1928 in their book Les Faux Amis ou les trahisons du vocabulaire anglais (False Friends, or the Pitfalls of the English Vocabulary).[1]

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /ˌfɒls ˈfɹɛnd/, /ˌfɔːls ˈfɹɛnd/
  • (General American) IPA(key): /ˌfɔls ˈfɹɛnd/, /ˌfɑls ˈfɹɛnd/
  • Audio (US):(file)
  • Audio (General Australian):(file)

Noun

Examples
  • The Spanish embarazado (“pregnant”) and English embarrassed.
  • The Portuguese parentes (“relatives”) and English parents.
  • The Chinese 手紙／手纸 (shǒuzhǐ, “toilet paper”) and Japanese 手紙 (tegami, “letter”), both of which are composed of the same characters.
  • The Italian triviale (“vulgar”) and English trivial. The two words are cognate through the Latin root trivium (“crossroads”).

false friend (plural false friends)

  1. (linguistics, translation studies, lexicography) A word in a language that bears a deceptive resemblance to a word in another language but in fact has a different meaning.
    Synonyms: faux ami; false cousin (uncommon)
    Coordinate term: true friend
    A word and its false friend may well be etymologically related: in such cases semantic shifts have made them drift apart.
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see false,‎ friend.

Hyponyms

Descendants

  • → Chinese: 假朋友 (jiǎpéngyou), 假友 (jiǎyǒu), 偽友／伪友 (wěiyǒu) (calque)

Translations

See also

  • Category:False cognates and false friends, lists of false friends in various languages
  • cognate
  • false cognate (not to be confused)
  • misnomer and phantonym (both with intralanguage relevance)

References

  1. ^ Christoph Gutknecht (2001) “Translation”, in Mark Aronoff, Janie Rees-Miller, editors, The Handbook of Linguistics, Blackwell Publishers, page 698
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