False Friend
False friends are pairs of words or phrases in two languages or dialects (or letters in two alphabets) that look or sound similar, but differ significantly in meaning. An example is Portuguese raro "rare" vs. Spanish raro "strange" (similarly, Spanish exquisito "exquisite" vs. Portuguese esquisito "strange"). A commonly misunderstood false friend is between the words constipation in English, and constipação (in Portuguese) where the latter means a cold in Portuguese.
Often, there is a partial overlap in meanings, which creates additional complications: e.g. Spanish lima, meaning "lime" (the fruit) and "lime" (the calcium-based material), but also "file" (the tool). Only when lima is used to mean a file does it become a false friend to the English "lime".
The term should be distinguished from "false cognates", which are similar words in different languages that appear to have a common historical linguistic origin (whatever their current meaning) but actually do not.
As well as complete false friends, use of loanwords often results in the use of a word in a restricted context, which may then develop new meanings not found in the original language.
Read more about False Friend: Implications, Semantic Change, Examples
Famous quotes containing the words false and/or friend:
“The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.)
“Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries in a thousand years have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover in their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)