| gen. |
false cognates (rechnik); false friends (False friends are words in two languages (or letters in two alphabets) that look or sound similar, but differ significantly in meaning. An example is the English embarrassed and the Spanish embarazada (which means pregnant), or the word sensible, which means reasonable in English, but sensitive in French and Spanish. Another example is the root L-H-M in Semitic languages, while "Lakham" in Hebrew and "Laham" in Syriac mean "Bread", "Laham" in Arabic is "Meat". The term is a shortened version of the expression "false friend of a translator", the French version of which (faux amis du traducteur) was introduced by linguists Maxime Koessler and Jules Derocquigny in 1928. WK Alexander Demidov) |
