False friend

False friend words 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. False friend letters are homographic graphemes (written characters) that differ significantly in pronunciation. 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 Maxime Kœssler and Jules Derocquigny in their 1928 book, with a sequel, . Sister alphabets like Ukrainian Cyrillic have homographic false friend letters that misdirect pronunciation by visually matching heterophonic Latin letters in both its upright ⟨прямий, pryamyy⟩ and in its italicized 'cursive' ⟨курсивний, kursyvnyy⟩ or ⟨письмівка, pys’mivka⟩ forms: • Note: 'Cursive' г, д, and л tend to incorrectly display their non-Ukrainian variants on many platforms as an artifact of official linguistic prohibitions during Soviet digitization. == 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 took on different restricted senses in Language A and Language B. English and Spanish, both of which have borrowed from Ancient Greek and Latin, have multiple false friends, such as: 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: but shifts in meaning of words with a shared etymology have in some instances resulted in 'bi-directional false friends': Note that die See means 'sea', and thus is not a false friend. 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 wasei-eigo ('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 ==