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False friends, regionalisms-what do you do? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 1 of 13 06 September 2012 at 5:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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There have been some awesome threads with examples of false friends and regional differences... But how do you actually learn them? What's your preference? These things usually come in lists, but most people don't appear to use them, and even those who do seem not to use pre-made lists.
I love etymology, and (with false friends) it's important for me to understand the shifts in meaning. I can't just accept that two words look similar but mean different things, unless they are from, say, Finnish and Indonesian. (Any recommended sources that are more than just lists, that explain how the meaning changed?) With my list of languages, I obviously have a lot of false friends to deal with, so it would be especially interesting to hear how others with similar lists manage. BTW, let's please use the word cognate correctly in this thread. Cognate means "related by blood" (cf natal), descending from the same word of an ancient language. Cognates aren't necessarily similar or obvious, and whenever loans are involved we're no longer talking about cognates. And especially, most international words aren't cognates because they never existed in, say, Latin. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5568 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 2 of 13 07 September 2012 at 6:01am | IP Logged | ||
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I agree, etymology is fun and it can help you remember a lot of things if it's something you're interested in, but often it's too cumbersome to go out of your way to look up the etymology of a word, or you don't have access to resources that would clear up the matter for you, or the etymology is more confusing than it's worth, so etymology can be only one piece of the puzzle.
For the most part, I think false friends can be treated like any other vocabulary item. First you want to just take notice of the word, examine how it is used, and incorporate it into your passive vocabulary. If you're getting enough exposure to the language and the word is a useful one, you'll see it again and again in different contexts, and its meaning will become more and more firmly entrenched in your memory (even if it is deceptively similar to a different word in another language you know — the differences will make themselves clear if you pay attention). Eventually, perhaps without even realizing it, you will start using it as part of your active vocabulary. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Gala Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4551 days ago 229 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 3 of 13 09 September 2012 at 4:56am | IP Logged | ||
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I detest the phrase "false friends." It sounds silly and childish. False cognate works
either way; if 2 word are technically cognates (f.e. molest/ molestar) the falsity lies in their not having equivalent meanings (although that example did until well within the last century.) If they aren't etymologically related (sopa/ soap) then they of course aren't true cognates, they are in fact *false* in both ways. Loan words can indeed be (and fairly often are) true cognates. This is extremely common with words borrowed by both English and Spanish from languages native to the Americas, and I'm sure the situation is similar everywhere that peoples and their languages have converged. F.E.: aguacate/ avocado (both from Nahuatl ahuactl,) canoa/canoe (from Arawakan canaoua.) These words are "related by blood." Edited by Gala on 09 September 2012 at 5:05am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 4 of 13 09 September 2012 at 5:17am | IP Logged | ||
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They are loans from the same source, not cognates. There was no word for avocado in Proto-IE :) Two girls named after the same famous woman aren't sisters.
I like Gunnemark's terms transparent/non-transparent. This focuses on whether a word's meaning is (correctly) obvious to speakers of another language, regardless of the reason. Thank you both for the responses :) @Levi, the problem is that if a word doesn't resemble anything, you'll just look it up or shrug and skip it without developing any wrong ideas about the meaning. Maybe I worry too much about not knowing the false friends in advance before I even see them. Now that I think of it, given my other preferences, perhaps the best way for me is to look at the L2 on the list, just to know that these words don't mean what they seem to mean. A typical clique of false friends involves too much information: X1, X2 (the similar words in L1, L2), Y, Z (the real translations), the fact that X1 doesn't equal X2, the fact that the translation of X1 and the meaning of X2 are not what you'd expect. It might be a good idea to start from that last bit. Edited by Serpent on 09 September 2012 at 5:24am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Gala Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4551 days ago 229 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 5 of 13 09 September 2012 at 5:57am | IP Logged | ||
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So cognates can only be from Proto-IE or languages descended from it? Or even only from
ancient languages? That's a pretty chauvinistic concept. Words don't have blood. "Related" in linguistic terms means "from the same source," as in the examples I gave. I find it funny that you consider the word "friend" in this context to be more correct than the word "cognate," based on the dictionary definition and etymology of the latter. What about the definition and etymology of the former? EDIT: Just checked my dictionary, and one of its definitions of cognate fits the loan- word examples I gave just fine: "A word related to one in another language." Also, I had been taking your word on the etymology of cognate, but according to my dictionary cognatus means "born together" (co[m], together + gnatus, born, var. of natus,) which certainly doesn't imply a lengthy process of descent, and once again fits those examples perfectly. Edited by Gala on 09 September 2012 at 6:28am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 6 of 13 09 September 2012 at 3:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm glad my first thought (that it means "born together") was correct. Shouldn't have trusted wiktionary.
Indo-European chauvinism? Me??? lol. Of course cognates don't have to descend from Proto-IE, if we're not talking about Indo-European languages. But we are. And of course if we narrow it down, much "younger" words can also count, such as Vulgar Latin for the cognates BETWEEN the Romance languages. What sort of dictionary gives such definitions? It's fine for the general public of course but all serious definitions online insist that the relation has to be by descent, coming from the same ancestor language etc. "The term cognate is usually reserved for two or more words in different languages that share a common ancestor as English father, Latin Pater, Greek pater, Spanish and Italian padre, French pere, and German Vater." Anyway, how do you actually learn them? :-) That's what the thread was supposed to be about... 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Gala Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4551 days ago 229 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 7 of 13 09 September 2012 at 6:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, "two or more words in different languages that share a common ancestor"
really does apply to pairs such as avocado/aguacate: the common ancestor (ahuactl) just happens to be a parent that became one due to a relatively recent linguistic "rape," so to speak. I think if we were closer in time to the historical circumstances that produced a lot of the Indo-European cognates we would be able to see some of the same sort of processes. That's the last I'll say on the subject; we can agree to disagree on this. Sorry for hijacking your thread, but I've found it a thought-provoking dispute. As for learning them, when Spanish was the only L2 I had to deal with, I never had any problem. Once I learned (through study or exposure) that a pair of words were not equivalent in meaning, I never had any difficulty retaining the info. However, when I took a couple of French classes last year (as supporting electives for my Spanish major) I noticed that it seemed more difficult to "turn off" the associations between similar (and false or misleading) French/Spanish pairs than French/English pairs. I'm now experiencing the same thing with Latin, which I've just begun. It's a struggle to remember that "salvare" is not equivalent to "salvar," I even mistranslated it on a test, despite having thoroughly studied the chapter's vocabulary. My theory is that, since L2's operate differently in the brain than L1, perhaps they compete for brain-space (so to speak) with each other more fiercely than they do with L1, with the strongest L2 tending to emerge victorious. I have no solutions to offer, other than just to say that extra effort and time must be spent, but I'll be watching this thread with interest. Edited by Gala on 09 September 2012 at 6:22pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5131 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 8 of 13 09 September 2012 at 6:57pm | IP Logged | ||
Not really. Aguacate, from my understanding, comes from the Nahuatl word for "testicle" (ahuácatl), while Avocado comes from Latin "advocatus" (advocate). Two completely different language families. Never mind the widely used "palta" (Quechua) in parts of South America. R. == 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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