Semantics and Pragmatics of False Friends

Pedro J. Chamizo-Domínguez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135908614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistic Semantics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book approaches the topic of false friends from a theoretical perspective, arguing that false friends carry out a positive role as a cognitive device, mainly in literature and jokes, and suggesting some pragmatic strategies in order to restore the original sense of a text/utterance when a given translator (or a foreign speaker) falls victim to false friends. This theoretical account is successively verified by appealing to texts from the fields of literature, science, philosophy, journalism, and everyday speech.

1 Clearing the Terrain

1.1. DEFINITION

The false friends phenomenon as a linguistic interference issue may be as old as the existence of natural languages itself. However, the term false friends itself is relatively new. In fact, the term false friends [faux amis, in French] was coined by Maxime Koessler and Jules Derocquigny in their well-known and seminal classical work Les faux amis, ou, Les trahisons du vocabulaire anglais: conseils aux traducteurs [False friends, or, The Treacheries of English Vocabulary: Advice to Translators] (1928). Nevertheless, although the eventually most widespread term was not coined until the 20th century, the phenomenon we now term false friends has long been studied. The references have been either occasional allusions to the problems they may pose or attempts to achieve a more systematic treatment. In fact, the oldest work about this topic I have heard of dates back to the 17th century, and it has been recently reprinted and studied (Larsson and Gruszczyński 1998). This work compiles a lexicon about Swedish and Polish false friends, where Latin is still used as a metalanguage: Nomina Polonica convenientia cum Sveticis, partim eundem partim diversum significantia Sensum Ordine Alphabetico collecta atque disposita [An Alphabetically Provided Collection of Polish Nouns, which Partially Coincide with and Partially Diverge from Swedish Nouns]. However, Koessler and Derocquigny's metaphorical coinage has become so widely spread that it is now lexicalised, at least among linguists and translators. The term now refers to the specific phenomenon of linguistic interference consisting of two given words in two or more given natural languages are graphically and/or phonetically the same or very alike; yet, their meanings may be totally or partially different. To put it in another way, false friends are those words which share their signifiers but differ totally or partially as regards their meanings. The most reasonable and easily understandable definition of false friend may be the one provided by T. Hayward and A. Moulin in Saussurean terms:

«The best definition of the problem one can give is probably in Saussurean terms. In the learner's mother tongue a particular signifiant is associated with a particular signifié. Once the signifiant appears, even in a foreign-language context, the above-mentioned association is so strong that the user automatically thinks of his mother-tongue signifié (in its totality).» (Quoted in Buncic 2000, italics in original).

That is particularly the reason why false friends are such tricky terms for translators and for non-native users; the latter are confident in the meaning of the word in their mother tongue, and so, they are tempted to suppose that the corresponding term in the other tongue means exactly the same as in their own mother tongue. And, in order to illustrate how deceitful false friends may become, the best we can do is to resort to the term false friends itself, which is now quite common among linguists and translators. As I have just pointed out, false friends is a calque from the French term faux amis, although this translation is at least unsuitable, despite being lexicalised now. And the reason is that treacherous, disloyal or unfaithful friends are not usually called false friends and falsos amigos, but bad friends and malos amigos in English and Spanish, respectively.

Yet, the term false friends is the most widely spread in the literature on this linguistic phenomenon, many other denominations have also been used and/or suggested. In fact, D. Buncic (2000: 4) quotes up to 16 more terms referring to the same or analogous phenomena. ¹ Other scholars as, for instance, F. Navarro (1997), whose authority in translation matters— and more particularly, in medical and paramedical texts — is beyond any reasonable doubt, usually includes false friends under the label palabras de traducción engañosa [misleading translatable words]. However, not all misleading translatable words are false friends, if we follow the definition I have provided. For example, the English collocation breast cancer would be tricky if we translate it into Spanish as cáncer de pecho and not as cáncer de mama, because in Spanish cáncer de pecho is used as a euphemism for cáncer de pulmón [lung cancer]. In other words, the so-called misleading translatable words are wider than false friends. As for the terms quoted up by Buncic, I would like to stress five of them insofar as their meanings could be applied to a wider phenomenon than that of false friends. Those terms are false pairs, deceptive words, false cognates, treacherous twins, and belles infidéles [literally, ‘unfaithful good-looking women’]. As can be easily inferred, all those terms used to refer to the present linguistic phenomenon coincide in qualifying it as deceptive or source of mistakes. From these five alternative terms to false friends, the most usual one may be false cognates. But using false cognates instead of false friends may lead us into error; consequently, we had better delimit properly the concepts of false cognates and false friends. Cognate is a learned derivation from the Latin word cognatus² [relative] and is used in linguistics for those words sharing a common origin, regardless of whether their meanings have evolved apart or not. For instance, in Spanish, the words cuñado [brother-in-law] and cuñada [sister-in-law] also derive from the same Latin root as cognate [‘cognado’, in Spanish], and, hence, all the three are a perfect example of linguistic cognates. These divergent Spanish words derived from Latin cognatus are very accurate examples of what I mean. In fact, regarding its grammatical category, the DRAE and the OED do only include cognado and cognate as adjectives and both are concisely defined as «emparentado morfológicamente» [morphologically related] and «coming naturally from the same root, or representing the same original word, with differences due to subsequent separate phonetic development» (OED), which obviates any semantic consideration. Accordingly, the Spanish noun padre and the French noun pére would be cognates because they both come from the Latin noun pater [all of them ‘father’]; nevertheless, in certain collocations and contexts—i.e., in Honoré de Balzac's work, Le pére Goriot [Old Goriot]— the French term should be translated into Spanish as tío [‘old’, but literally ‘uncle’] and not padre [father]. Furthermore, in some other contexts, the Spanish term should be translated into French as abbé [abbot] when Spanish padre means priest. Thus, cases such as those two words may be partial semantic false friends, though real cognates. Conversely, the Italian word cazzo [cock, penis] and the Spanish word cazo [ladle, small saucepan] would be false friends and false cognates inasmuch as their respective meanings are different; additionally, there is not any etymoogical relation which dates back to a common root for both words. This makes the set of false friends wider than the set of false cognates, since all false cognates are false friends, but not all false friends are false cognates. More accurately, the set of false friends includes the group of false cognates, but not vice versa. Consequently, false cognates would be a hyponym of false friends, and thus, the latter would be a superordinate term to the extent that it includes false cognates and real cognates, which may have total or partial different meanings, though. Hence, false cognates would be those false friends which I will later label as “chance false friends.”

1.2. CLASSIFICATION

From the signifiers point of view and from a synchronic perspective, when false friends are spelled the same or very similar, they are called homographs. For example, the Finish word juusto [cheese] and the Spanish word justo [fair, just] are graphically similar, but their pronunciations are quite different and their meanings completely divergent. Analogously, the French noun van [sieve; horse trailer] and the English noun van share the same spelling, but their meanings do not coincide at all. The same is true of the Dutch van [of] and the Spanish verbal form van [third person plural, simple present tense, verb ‘to go’], which might also be considered false friends of the French and English nouns. On the other hand, when false friends are phonetically the same or very similar, their accurate name is homophones. To take a case in point, the English noun pun, the French noun panne [breakdown, fault, malfuncion], and the Spanish noun pan [bread] are pronounced similarly; yet, they are not semantically related. However and in order to not make things more complicate than they are by themselves, in the present research I will only consider false friends those pairs which belong to the same grammatical category in two given languages, but not those of different grammatical categories.

From a semantic and synchronic point of view, false friends have been classified adopting very different perspectives (Carroll 1992: 101; Trup 1998: 50–60; Buncic 2000; Prado 2001: 9–11; Chamizo Domínguez and Nerlich 2002: 1835–1837; Szpila 2003: 7–10; Pérez Velasco 2004; Chamizo Domínguez 2006a). These perspectives may be summarised into two basic types:

1. Chance false friends.

2. Semantic false friends.

For the purposes of this study, chance false friends are those pairs of words which are (graphically and/or phonetically) the same or similar in two or more given languages, but without any semantic or etymological reason which may account for this sameness or similarity. The Spanish word misa [holy mass] and the Slovakian word misa [platter] may be considered paradigmatic cases of chance false friends. Similarly, the Spanish word auge [increase, peak], the French word auge [(watering) trough, manger; bucket, conduit; valley] and the German word Auge [eye] share their spelling forms, but they neither share their meanings nor their pronunciations. A particularly curious instance of chance false friends is the one existing between the Spanish noun chumbo [prickly pear] and the Portuguese noun chumbo [lead], which leads Spaniards to get really surprised when they realise that Portuguese petrol stations have sem chumbo petrol [‘leadless/unleaded’, in Portuguese; ‘without prickly pear’, in Spanish]. The etymology of the Portuguese word is clear: chumbo derives from the Latin noun plumbeum [lead]. Unfortunately, the etymology of the Spanish word is obscure, at least according to the information provided by the authoritative etymological dictionary of Corominas and Pascual (1984–87).

The path followed by words becoming chance false friends is sometimes most unexpected. We may even find cases of homonymy in the most unexpected places, such as acronyms and abbreviations. Thus, the English abbreviation DNA means deoxyribonucleic acid in medical and biological jargon; conversely, it means does not answer in the jargon of telecommunication (Allan 2001: 172). Similarly, the noun spa is lately being used in Spanish, although not included in the DRAE yet, with the original English meaning of «a commercial establishment which offers health and beauty treatment (esp. for women) trough steam baths, exercise equipment, massage and the like», but not according to its original meaning of «a medical or mineral spring or well» [‘balneario’, ‘baños’ or ‘termas’, in Spanish]. However, the English noun itself was originally an acronym of the Latin phrase salus per aqua [health through water] and/or borrowed from the toponym Spa, a small town in eastern Belgium noted for its mineral springs; whereas the Italian spa is also the acronym of società per azioni, which refers to public limited company. As a result, the Italian spa has two different meanings, which make this word become a partial false friend as regards the noun spa in other languages, where it only entails one meaning. To be precise, Italians write spa when they mean mineral spring or resort and SpA when they mean public limited company, but their pronunciations are identical in both cases.

Chance false friends across two languages are equivalent to homonymy within a single language. Although chance false friends are usually less problematic than semantic false friends, they are frequently a source of surprising mistakes—because they are more easily spotted out in context—as reflected in the example quoted by Maxime Koessler, where the French Consul in Malaga used the French verb s'assommer [to knock oneself out] according to the meaning of the Spanish verb asomarse [to lean out]; and the French verb enterer [to bury] according to the meaning of the Spanish one enterar [to inform, to acquaint, to tell]:

«On peut montrer le péril à l'oeuvre par l'anecdote du Consul de France à Malaga, si imprégné d'espagnol qu'il criait du jardin à sa femme à l’étage : ‘Assomme-toi que je t'enterre !’ pour lui dire : ‘penche-toi que je te mette au courant.’ (En castillan, asomarse, se montrer á la fenêtre, enterar, mettre au courant.)» [One can show an actual instance of this riskiness through the following anecdote. The French Consul in Malaga was so much imbued with Spanish that he would shout from the garden to his wife who was at the first floor: ‘Knock yourself out so that I bury you!’ instead of saying ‘Lean out of the window so that I inform you.’ (In Castilian asomarse, to lean out of the window, enterar, to inform)] (Koessler 1975: LXX).

Likewise, although the English noun rape and the Spanish noun rape [monkfish, anglerfish] are instances of chance false friends, Julio C. San– toyo (1989: 55) claims to have found in a restaurant menu the English phrase «Rape sailor's style» as the translation of the Spanish course «Rape a la marinera» [monkfish with prawns, mussels and onions in a wine sauce]. And to make things more complicated, the Spanish term rape is an instance of homonymy: thus, rape means «rasura o corte de la barba hecho de prisa y sin cuidado» [closely-cropped hair], whereas rape² means «pejesapo» [anglerfish, literally ‘toadfish’], which, in turn, is defined as «pez teleósteo marino del suborden de los Acantopterigios, que llega a un metro de longitud, con cabeza enorme, redonda, aplastada y con tres apéndices superiores largos y movibles, boca grandísima, colocada, así como los ojos, en la parte superior de la cabeza, cuerpo pequeño y fusiforme, aletas pectorales muy grandes, y pequeñas las del dorso y cola. Carece de escamas, es de color oscuro por el lomo y blanco por el vientre, y tiene por todo el borde del cuerpo como unas barbillas carnosas» (DRAE). Consequently, the Spanish phrase rape a la marinera never is interpreted as sexual violation but both as closely-cropped hair sailor's style or as angler fish cooked in seafood sauce. We usually understand the latter as the acceptable interpretation, only because we have found it written in a restaurant menu context. However, the first interpretation might be the most acceptable one in a barber's context, for example; while both interpretations could be plausible in a sea context. And, in turn, something similar could be said about the English utterance «Rape sailor's style», since the noun rape means three ravishment or violation, plunder or pillage, and colza.

Chance false friends may be found in any two given languages, inasmuch as they are the result of random changes. Therefore, when both languages do not share any common origin, the ratio of chance false friends is higher than semantic false friends. In this case, except for some isolated borrow...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Linguistics
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1 Clearing the Terrain
• 2 Synonymy, Polysemy, Homonymy, Register and Diachrony
• 3 Semantics of False Friends: Borrowings, Calques and Inheritances
• 4 Semantics of False Friends: Tropical False Friends
• 5 Pragmatics of False Friends
• 6 Main Theses Exposed and Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index