German Gift means poison, not a present
Both go back to a root meaning 'something given'; German narrowed to the fatal sense, as in Mitgift, a dowry
General knowledge · Words & language
False friends
Term coined 1928
Translation — words that look the same and are not
Pairs of words in two languages that look or sound alike but mean different things, so that the resemblance misleads the learner. The name is a shortening of faux amis du traducteur, the title of a 1928 study by Maxime Koessler and Jules Derocquigny of the traps that French sets for readers of English. Some pairs are genuine cousins that have drifted apart — French actuel and English actual both descend from Latin actualis — and some are pure coincidence, like German Gift and English gift.
How to spot them
- ▸German Gift, Spanish embarazada, French librairie — the standard three
- ▸A French title of 1928 gave the phrase its name
- ▸Some pairs are related and have drifted; some merely look alike by accident
- ▸The cousins in reverse: German Handy for a mobile phone, French smoking for a dinner jacket
Key facts
Spanish embarazada means pregnant, not embarrassed
The classic advertising disaster for a translator
French librairie is a bookshop; the building full of borrowable books is the bibliothèque
Latin liber, a book, versus Greek biblion
Italian morbido means soft, and Italian camera means room
From Latin morbidus, sickly, which softened in meaning in Italian alone
German bekommen means to receive; the verb meaning to become is werden
The waiter asking what you will bekommen is not offering a transformation
French demander only asks; actuellement means currently, and éventuellement means possibly
Three of the commonest traps for English speakers reading French
Swedish bra means good; Norwegian gift means both married and poisoned
The Norwegian pair is an accident of the same Germanic root
A 1928 book by Koessler and Derocquigny on the treacheries of English vocabulary gave the phenomenon its name (1928)
Les faux amis, ou les trahisons du vocabulaire anglais
Key ideas
- There are two distinct kinds. True cognates that diverged in meaning, like French actuel and English actual, are cases of semantic drift. Chance look-alikes, like German Gift and English gift or Japanese arigatō and Portuguese obrigado, are unrelated coincidences.
- A pseudo-anglicism is the reverse trap: a word that looks English but is not used that way in English. German Handy, French smoking and Japanese manshon are borrowed English material put to a different use.
Quick-fire facts
- •The term is a clipping of the French faux amis du traducteur, coined by Maxime Koessler and Jules Derocquigny in 1928
- •French sensible means sensitive; the English sense is raisonnable
- •French préservatif and Spanish preservativo mean condom
- •French magasin and Spanish magacín contrast with English magazine, which came from Arabic makhāzin, storehouses, by way of French
- •German Rat means advice or counsel, and Chef means boss rather than cook
- •German Gymnasium is a selective secondary school, not a sports hall
- •Polish ordynarny means vulgar, and Czech host means guest
- •Japanese manshon, from English mansion, means a block of flats
- •Portuguese puxe on a door means push in English but tells you to pull
- •Welsh has its own trap for English readers: dim does not mean faint but 'no' or 'nothing'
Drill it — 7 cards
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Sources
- David Crystal — The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language
- David Bellos — Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything