False Friend - Examples

Examples

Since English, German and Dutch have many of the same etymological origins, there actually are a great number of words in both languages that are very similar and do have the same meaning (e.g. word/Wort/woord, book/Buch/boek, house/Haus/huis, water/Wasser/water ...). However, similar words with a different meaning are also quite common (e.g., German bekommen means "to receive", not "to become", and is thus a false friend, which could lead a German English learner to utter an embarrassing sentence like: "I want to become a beefsteak."). Another example is the word gift, which in English and Dutch means a "present" but in German and the Scandinavian languages means "poison" (the Swedish word for "gift" being gåva, related to the verb "to give"). In Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, "gift" also means 'married', in the sense 'given in marriage'.

English "knight" and German and Dutch Knecht are clearly related (though pronounced differently), and originally had also a similar meaning, denoting a person rather low in the social scale. However, the English one underwent a great upward mobility during the Middle Ages, becoming associated with the aristocracy, while its German equivalent retained the humble meaning of "servant". (To make the confusion even greater, where Knecht in German received a military meaning—in "Landsknecht"—it denoted foot soldiers rather than cavalry). The German word for English "knight" is Ritter, the Dutch ridder, the Swedish riddare, which is the cognate of English "rider" - but which carries vast social implications absent from the English word.

The German word Land is the exact cognate of English land but it carries many political, constitutional, and historical meanings absent from the English term (among other things a constituent state of the German Federal Republic, historically a principality of the Holy Roman Empire, but also "rural" as opposed to "urban", etc.—the Swedish lantis equating to "country bumpkin" or "hick"—most of these meanings are borne by the Anglo-Norman word country in English).

The title of the well-known Italian novel Il Gattopardo was rendered in English as "The Leopard", in which the translator was led astray by a false friend; Italian gattopardo, while being the cognate of "leopard", in fact refers to other felines (the American ocelot, the African serval and an extinct type of Italian wildcat).

False friends can be especially confusing when meanings of words in one language are similar to those in another, especially when context cannot help in resolving the confusion. For example, German and Scandinavian "Hund" and Dutch "Hond" are the cognates of English "hound", but whereas hund and hond refer to dogs in general, in English the sense has been narrowed to dogs used for hunting. Conversely, the German "Dogge" and French "dogue" refer to a specific kind of dog rather than to dogs in general. And French "librairie" or Romanian "librărie" are the cognate of "library" but refers to a bookshop.

Another Spanish/English false friend is "embarrassed/embarazado". Where "embarrassed" in English means approximately "ashamed", a similar-sounding Spanish word, "embarazada", means "pregnant". Both derive from old Castillan-Portuguese "embarazar", meaning impede, hinder, obstruct. In Spanish it was then used as euphemism for "pregnant" (she was "embarrassed"—hindered—by her pregnancy) and that became the primary meaning. In English, the meaning was taken from being "embarrassed", ill at ease, hindered, by shame. In Portuguese, "embaraçar" has a meaning similar to the English. (In medical English, however, "embarrass" retains a meaning much more general than in the language as a whole: essentially, to diminish.)

Yet another Spanish/English false friend is "America/América", where the word "America" in English, and singular, is usually used to talk about the United States of America, and the word "América" in Spanish is used to talk about the whole American continent. This false friend in particular is cause of controversies for Hispano American people.

In Spanish "sustituir" means "replace" so that "sustituir A por B" means "replace A with B" or "substitute B for A", the opposite of what it apparently might look like.

Another example is the English pair of words "assist" and "attend", whose meanings in Spanish are just the opposite. So, "attending a course" is "asistir un curso" and "assist someone" is "atender a alguien".

The main meaning of the Italian verb "pretendere" is "demand", while in Spanish, "pretender" basically means "try to"—although both verbs have a (very) secondary meaning "pretend".

A Spanish/Maltese false friend is guapo/a and gwapp/a respectively. While the former means "handsome", the latter gives an ironic sense of "clumsy", akin to the English "That was clever!"

The Latin root of concur has several meanings; "to meet (in battle)" and "to meet (in agreement)". In many European languages, words derived from this root take after the first meaning—English being a notable exception (e.g. French and Dutch concurrent, German Konkurrent and Russian конкурент translate as "competitor" in English). Additionally, in some languages a "concourse" (Swedish konkurs, Finnish konkurssi, German Konkurs) takes its meaning from "concourse of debtors"; that is, it means bankruptcy, while in Russian конкурс takes one more meaning and refers to contest. Likewise, in the context of corporations, German Konzern, Swedish koncern and Finnish konserni means "conglomerate", not "concern".

The French verb attendre means "to wait", yet an English speaker learning French might expect the English equivalent to be "attend", which means "to participate in" or "to go to". However, the verb "attend" in English is translated as assister in French and asistir in Spanish, both of which could be further misinterpreted as equivalent to the English "assist", which means "to help" (which is also another meaning of the Spanish's asistir). In Catholic literature in English, the term "assist at Mass" has been used to mean "to attend Mass" due to a mistranslation of the French "assister à la messe" which means "to attend Mass". Despite the above, the noun form in English ("attendant") is someone who waits on another, generally with menial tasks and in a temporary fashion, as on an airplane or hotel; whereas 'assistant' implies a longer-term, higher level, and often contractual (=employment), relationship. French actor Gérard Depardieu was involved in a famous row with American feminists because he mistakenly said he "assisted" a rape in his tumultuous teenage years, while what he really meant was that he had "witnessed" one such event.

'Rare' in English means "uncommon", while raar in Dutch means "strange", and similarly rar in Swedish means "rare" ("sällsynt", SAOL) as well as the more common meaning "nice", "cute", "dear" or "sweet", but in neighboring Norwegian: "peculiar" or "awkward". On the other hand, the Dutch word for "uncommon" is zeldzaam, while the German word seltsam (Swedish sällsam) means "strange".

Dutch in English refers to the language spoken in the Netherlands and Flanders. Duits in Dutch refers to the language spoken in Germany ("Duitsland"). However, the term "Pennsylvania Dutch" refers to a group of people originally from Germany.

English "Welsh" does not mean the same as German "Welsch-" (implying, roughly, "Romance-language-speaking") or Polish "Włoch" (an Italian) or Greek Βλάχ (Romanian and/or Aromanian), all stemming from an Old German root *welkh meaning "foreigner".

"Pasta" in Turkish and Greek means cake, not the famous Italian dish. In Dutch it means "paste", for example in "tandpasta" (toothpaste), although the Dutch also use the word to refer to the noodle dish.

A Portuguese/English double false friend is for example the English word "ordinary" (which has the roughly the same meaning as "normal" or "regular") in Portuguese means "vulgar". The English word "vulgar" (something vile, rude, crude or disgusting) has the rough translation of "ordinário/a" in Portuguese which is also used as an adjective to insult people: "Seu ordinário!" meaning "You are a vulgar!". Similar in German with "ordinär" (while a real equivalent for "ordinary" can be, especially in administrative or legal language, "ordentlich", which however also means "decent" and "tidy").