Talk:False friend

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Example farm

This largely unreferenced article turned into an example farm magnet. Therefore I trimmed it severely. There are whole dictionaries of false friends. Please do not add more examples, unless they illustrate some new phenomenon with false friends. Please do not add nonnotable examples. Nearly every word of greek or latin root generated false friends. Staszek Lem (talk) 17:24, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Good!--Bob Mudford (talk) 07:31, 14 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Dutch neger

Neger used to be the neutral Dutch term for a black person but is cognate to the highly offensive English word nigger.

Clarify: did Dutch neger fade from use because of the English taboo, or take on the offensive connotations of nigger but remain in use, or what? —Tamfang (talk) 23:32, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It's not really a valid example at all; regardless what the answer to the above question is, it's now offense if Dutch, too, so it's not a false friend. In former times, the English word was simply a neutral mispronunciation of "negro" by illiterate US southern whites, so back-when they weren't false friends either. The fact that the cognate words shifted from neutral to offensive at not precisely the same rate doesn't make them false friends. No cognates shift in meaning in multiple languages at precisely the same rate, even in the Internet era. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 08:19, 22 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Farm example

The American Italian fattoria lost its original meaning 'farm' in favour of 'factory' owing to the cognate English word factory (cf. Standard Italian fabbrica 'factory'). Instead of the original fattoria, the phonetic adaptation American Italian farma (Weinreich 1963: 49) became the new signifier for 'farm'—see "one-to-one correlation between signifiers and referents".

The meaning of "American Italian" is not as obvious as one might prefer. I guess it means "Italian as spoken in North America"; if so, it would be better to say that. (I assume that Italian as spoken in Latin America, which could as reasonably be called "American Italian" by analogy with "American Spanish", has not been influenced in the same way!) —Tamfang (talk) 01:32, 5 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

corn paragraph

Corn was originally the dominant type of grain in a region (indeed corn and grain are themselves cognates from the same Indo-European root). It came to mean usually cereals in general in the British Isles in the nineteenth century, as in the Corn laws, but maize in North America, and now just maize also in the British Isles.

This whole paragraph is oddly phrased. What region is being referred to? "usually cereals in general"? That last line also goes on far too long. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.5.189.96 (talk) 11:50, 25 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Unexplained edits

On 9 May 2015, there was an unexplained edit to the effect that "to root" is used also in British English to mean "to support".

My reversion (26 June 2015) of that change has twice been reversed by user Rsrikanth05, first with no explanation, then with an explanation "Removed British English on the basis of an assumption that an IP claims so. Please discuss".

It is difficult to see how we can approach an agreement where changes are made with no explanation (as on 9 May and in Rsrikanth05's first reversion) or where the explanation is confused (as in Rsrikanth05's second reversion, in this case to the extent that it describes the opposite of the change which he/she has made and where the rest of the description appears to make no sense). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mike Shepherd (talk • contribs) 05:38, 26 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 22 July 2015

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: not moved. (non-admin closure) Calidum T|C 23:19, 31 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

False friend → False friends – Obligatorily plural (as a encyclopedic topic; I don't mean that one cannot say "embarazada is a false friend"). There's no such thing as a single false friend, conceptually; there must be two or more, by definition, even if only one is mentioned in a particular clause. This article is about a relationship between words (plural). See here for how routine this kind of move is. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 08:13, 22 July 2015 (UTC) Clarified. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 03:01, 24 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose, the definition of "false friend" can apply to the single foreign-language word that sounds similar to the native-language word. O N R (talk) 09:12, 22 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose, 'by definition' - not. They are not false friends of each other. THey are "false friends of a translator". -M.Altenmann >t 14:57, 22 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose, often singular. In ictu oculi (talk) 03:01, 23 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Support The page seems to indicate that two or more are needed. And look at the external links, they all go with "false friends". The category is already named "False friends".Randy Kryn 13:24, 23 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
"two or more" what? Please read my explanation of the meaning of the term. -M.Altenmann >t 15:04, 23 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Two or more words. The words themselves are false friends to each other. From the first sentence of the article: "False friends are words in two languages (or letters in two alphabets) that look or sound similar, but differ significantly in meaning." It sounds like the false friends in Wikipedia's definition are the words themselves, not the translator. At least in that definition. And then you have the external links all being to "False friends". Maybe there are two accurate points-of-view on this question. Randy Kryn 18:34, 23 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Clarified: The above "opposes" have not noticed while the singular construction is semantically okay in some sentences ("embarazada is a false friend"), it is conceptually still obligatorily plural; it's impossible for a word in isolation to just be "a false friend" intrinsically, the way can it just be a noun without having to have a relationship to other nouns to be defined as one. The false-friends relationship between two or more words is the sort of thing that is a routine pluralization at RM. This WP article is about the concept of the relationship between false friends (plural) as the lead makes clear. The abstract concept of "a false friend in isolation" (a word that can be in a false-friends relationship with one or more other words, rather than the relationship per se) is not by itself an encyclopedic topic. @Old Naval Rooftops, Altenmann, and In ictu oculi: Please reconsider. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 03:01, 24 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- disagreed. It looks like you did not read my rationale, nor the article itself. It is perfectly well possible to be a singular false friend of an interpreter, which the term actually means, and what may be easily verified from linguistic sources. Your theorizing about "relation bwtween two words" which somehow defines the "correct" usage is your personal opinion. -M.Altenmann >t 03:50, 24 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose, though with respect. See spouse, sibling, cousin, etc... just because they always come in pairs or more doesn't mean we pluralize them. Red Slash 04:02, 25 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. There are many things that, by definition, come in multiples, but one can refer to a single one of that set, and Wikipedia convention is to prefer the singular. —Lowellian (reply) 07:31, 25 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Origin of the term "false friend"?

Just curious, btw most other languages that I can decipher appear to use the verbatim translation for this. 90.186.79.215 (talk) 12:17, 2 August 2016 (UTC) Ok.. Italian wikipedia has the explanation "In francese, l'espressione faux amis è stata creata da M. Koessler e J. Derocquigny" and google spits out [1]. 90.186.79.215 (talk) 13:15, 2 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

No mention in the article of the ordinary, non-technical sense of the term, ie. a person (or country etc.) considered an ally, who later commits a treacherous act. Doug butler (talk) 22:10, 11 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]