Faux Amis

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, Grant and Martha, this is Tim from Baltimore, Maryland.

Well, hello, Tim. How are you doing?

Hi, Tim.

Pretty well, thanks.

I have a question for you guys, and I’m hoping you’ll be able to help me with it. It’s about homophones and homographs. We know what they are in English, like there, there, there, and when they’re spelled the same, homographs. But what is it called when you have a word that is a homograph or a homophone with another language? And do you have some examples of that?

Oh, I have plenty.

Okay. The word in Dutch and German for wall, it’s wand, or they pronounce it wand, but they spell it W-A-N-D, which, you know, in English means a stick or a baton or a magical device. In French, their word for bread is pan, which is pronounced pan, but it’s spelled P-A-I-N, which to us is pain. There are so many of them that I encounter, and they always stick out to me because I think it’s so strange.

Yeah, where do you encounter them?

Usually, well, I do news reporting, and a lot of times I have to take articles from other countries and translate them into English via whatever methods I can. And, you know, a lot of times words will, you know, stick out to me. And I’m like, oh, I’ll see if it’s in, you know, the Latin alphabet and it’s written the same way as the word in English. I always take note of that.

So you’re looking for the word for those words that are in other languages and look like they’re English words, but don’t mean the same thing. Like gift in German is another one.

Yes. Poison.

Yeah. You don’t want me to give you a gift in German. And soy, soy in Spanish and soy in English are very different things.

Oh, yeah, sure, sure. Or, you know, if you go to a restaurant where they speak Spanish and you order tuna, you’re going to get prickly pear cactus or edible cactus. So you have to be careful about those things. And R-E-D means network in Spanish, but it means the color in English. So, yeah, there’s tons of this stuff.

I’d say, Martha, wouldn’t you, that these are some kind of false cognate or false friend?

Yes, false friends is the term that I see for it. In French as I learned it in French class. But usually when we talk about false cognates or false friends between languages, they actually do tend to have an etymological root, but the word has taken a different path in the two languages. French and English, of course, because their shared history, has hundreds if not thousands of these words that are not quite the same thing in each language. And it goes both ways. It’s not just French words that became English words, but English words that became French words tend to be transformed in their meanings as well. And so you can really make a fool out of yourself.

Yeah, I remember reading about a product called Mist, something Mist. Maybe it was Canadian Mist or something that they tried to market in Germany. But in German, Mist means dung or filth.

Oh, yeah, yeah. That doesn’t work at all. But, Tim, I don’t know of any more technical-sounding term than false friends. I think that’s the one that you’ll find. In fact, if you Google false friends, pretty soon you’ll come up with and Google for the images. There’s a pretty funny picture of an ad in Dutch of this little kid looking up in this field. And it looks like the ad is saying, Mama, die, die, die. But, of course, the little kid in Dutch is saying, Mama, this one, this one, this one. Or that one, that one, that one. So you do have to be careful about those false friends.

That is fantastic.

Cool. Thanks for calling, Tim.

Thanks, Tim.

Thank you very much, you guys.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye.

Oh, man. Well, I bet folks listening probably have a lot of great stories about false friends, too. We’d love to hear about them. Not your friends who are false to you, but those words. So let us know, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.