Download `False Friends` and English Loan Words

‘False Friends’ and English Loan Words
Exp.ref. Carmen VATAMANU
The practice of taking a word from a foreign language and introducing
it into another is called ‘borrowing’ and the words thus ‘borrowed’ are
known as Loan Words. It is worth mentioning from the outset that, since
no language ever took a word from another language with the intention of
one day returning it, and since such words are never returned, even once
they have outstayed their welcome in the borrowing language, both of
these terms are misnomers. It is also important to understand that this is
not a modern phenomenon brought about by globalization but has always
taken place whenever different language communities come into contact
with each other.
Loanwords are words adopted by the speakers of one language from a
different language (the source language). A loanword can also be called a
borrowing. The abstract noun borrowing refers to the process of speakers
adopting words from a source language into their native language. “Loan”
and “borrowing” are of course metaphors, because there is no literal
lending process. There is no transfer from one language to another, and no
“returning” words to the source language. The words simply come to be
used by a speech community that speaks a different language from the one
these words originated in.
Borrowing is a consequence of cultural contact between two language
communities. Borrowing of words can go in both directions between the
two languages in contact, but often there is an asymmetry, such that more
words go from one side to the other. In this case the source language
community has some advantage of power, prestige and/or wealth that
makes the objects and ideas it brings desirable and useful to the borrowing
language community. For example, the Germanic tribes in the first few
centuries A.D. adopted numerous loanwords from Latin as they adopted
new products via trade with the Romans. Few Germanic words, on the
other hand, passed into Latin.
The actual process of borrowing is complex and involves many usage
events (i.e. instances of use of the new word). Generally, some speakers of
the borrowing language know the source language too, or at least enough
of it to utilize the relevant word. They (often consciously) adopt the new
word when speaking the borrowing language, because it most exactly fits
the idea they are trying to express. If they are bilingual in the source
language, which is often the case, they might pronounce the words the
same or similar to the way they are pronounced in the source language. For
example, English speakers adopted the word garage from French, at first
with a pronunciation nearer to the French pronunciation than is now
usually found. Presumably the very first speakers who used the word in
English knew at least some French and heard the word used by French
speakers, in a French-speaking context.
Those who first use the new word might use it at first only with
speakers of the source language who know the word, but at some point
they come to use the word with those to whom the word was not
previously known. To these speakers the word may sound ‘foreign’. At
this stage, when most speakers do not know the word and if they hear it
think it is from another language, the word can be called a foreign word.
There are many foreign words and phrases used in English such as bon
vivant (French), mutatis mutandis (Latin), and Fahrvergnuegen (German).
However, in time more speakers can become familiar with a new
foreign word or expression. The community of users of this word can grow
to the point where even people who know little or nothing of the source
language understand, and even use, the novel word themselves. The new
word becomes conventionalized: part of the conventional ways of speaking
in the borrowing language. At this point we call it a borrowing or
loanword.
It should be noted that not all foreign words do become loanwords; if
they fall out of use before they become widespread, they do not reach the
loanword stage.
Conventionalization is a gradual process in which a word
progressively permeates a larger and larger speech community, becoming
part of ever more people’s linguistic repertoire. As part of its becoming
more familiar to more people, a newly borrowed word gradually adopts
sound and other characteristics of the borrowing language as speakers who
do not know the source language accommodate it to their own linguistic
systems. In time, people in the borrowing community do not perceive the
word as a loanword at all. Generally, the longer a borrowed word has been
in the language, and the more frequently it is used, the more it resembles
the native words of the language.
English has gone through many periods in which large numbers of
words from a particular language were borrowed. These periods coincide
with times of major cultural contact between English speakers and those
speaking other languages. The waves of borrowing during periods of
especially strong cultural contacts are not sharply delimited, and can
overlap. For example, the Norse influence on English began already in the
8th century A.D. and continued strongly well after the Norman Conquest
brought a large influx of Norman French to the language.
It is part of the cultural history of English speakers that they have
always adopted loanwords from the languages of whatever cultures they
have come in contact with. There have been few periods when borrowing
became unfashionable, and there has never been a national academy in
Britain, the U.S., or other English-speaking countries to attempt to restrict
new loanwords, as there has been in many continental European countries.
Words are often taken from other languages to fill lexical gaps - to
provide names for new objects or phenomena. Thus, window was
'borrowed' by English from Old Norse via Danish in around 1200. But
borrowed words also often compete with existing words in the borrowing
language as different foreign languages come into and out of fashion, as
the French language has in England over the centuries. This is why
English has both cookery and cuisine, friendly and amiable, help and aid.
Some loan words keep their foreign appearance, like the French bon vivant
in English, while others are adapted to the orthography and pronunciation
of the host language, like battery from Old French batterie. Another type
are translated directly into the host language, creating loan translations or
calques. This is how honeymoon became lune de miel in French.
Curiously, having borrowed weekend at the beginning of the 20th century,
French now attempts to avoid the Anglicism rather half-heartedly, by
using the loan translation fin de semaine.
But perhaps the most important feature of the borrowing phenomenon
for language learners and teachers alike is that once the word has been
borrowed and, where appropriate, adapted orthographically, it becomes a
part of the 'host language' and the speakers of that language can do with it
what they will. And they do! Some loan words can be trusted and can be a
real boost to the language learner's comprehension and vocabulary
learning, but others are traps. There is, therefore, an alarming stock of false
friends among words which look thoroughly trustworthy to the learner
whose mother-tongue those words were borrowed from.
English was once one of the most assiduous borrowers of words and
has been borrowing words from French, for example, for more than 900
years. Here are some that spring immediately to mind: femme fatale, faux
pas, déja vu, tête-a-tête, au fait, margarine and migraine.
Even our old friend, faux ami is a frequently used French loan
expression for the loan translation false friend. But French is not the only
source of borrowed words in English. From German, for example, we
borrowed Schadenfreude, Angst, Flak, Blitz, Rucksack, Kindergarten, and
Vandal. And Italian gave us pasta, pizza, spaghetti, opera, mafia,
pianissimo and ciao. It is to Spanish that we owe cockroach, though we
did take the Spanish word cucaracha and adapt it to a more English
pronunciation and spelling. And we borrow from other varieties of our
own language too. US English gave us radar, blizzard, rattlesnake, and
stunt (the noun), for example.
These days, however, English, and especially the US varieties of
English, has become far more of a lender than a borrower.
When it comes to borrowing words, linguistic receptiveness tends to
go hand in hand with cultural receptiveness and this has certainly been the
case in the history of English as a word lender. As a lender, English was a
late starter. There is very little evidence of English influencing the
languages of even its closest neighbours before the beginning of the 18th
century. It was at this time that France, closely followed by Italy and then
by other European nations, developed an enthusiasm for all things English,
and this included words. A huge number of English loan words entered
French and, directly or indirectly, via French, the other languages of
Europe.
In the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st, globalization and
the level of contact between countries has meant that English words have
spread more widely and in greater number than ever before. This is largely
due to the cultural and political predominance of the USA, in particular.
These days, English words enter the languages of countries worldwide
through pop and youth culture, technology (in particular, computers and
the Internet), the media and advertising, among other channels.
Governments all over the world, and particularly in South East Asia, have
complained that there isn't time to translate these English words into the
local language and so a hybrid of English and the local language develops,
often referred to as 'Tinglish' (Thai and English) or ‘Chinglish’ (Chinese
and English) for example. Borrowing can even lead to loan words
outnumbering indigenous words, as they do in Korea (which borrows
heavily from Chinese and English in particular) by an estimated ratio of
60% to 40%. In Iceland a board has been set up dedicated to translating
words for new phenomena into more Icelandic-based words to prevent this
happening.
With English words being so avidly and speedily absorbed into
foreign languages either out of necessity or at the whim of fashion, and
with borrowing being the free and ungoverned process it has always
tended to be, interpretations of meaning are often quite mistaken or quite
deliberately disregarded. The important thing, it seems, in very many
cases, is not what the word being borrowed actually means, but quite
simply, that it is an English word. It is worth remembering that English
once gobbled up French in the same way.
Loans take a number of different forms, though many will fall into
more than one category, and they can all lead to the creation of False
Friends.
In many cases, the word or expression is taken into the receiving
language wholesale with its spelling and orthography intact as an
Anglicism but is then applied to something different. In German a Cracker
is a computer hacker and a Catcher is a wrestler. In Swedish, a babysitter
is a particular type of child's seat. And in a French car le starter is the
choke, for example.
In other cases, the word is adapted to the orthography and
pronunciation of the borrowing language, as it is in Polish dres, which
means tracksuit, or lunatyk, which means sleepwalker. In languages,
which do not have an identical or very similar writing system to English,
this is, of course, absolutely necessary.
A particularly common and curious case is where an English word
with an -ing ending is used to create a new noun or (rarely) adjective in the
borrowing language. These odd Anglicisms are often misleading. This is
particularly common in French:
le footing
le brushing
le parking
le camping
Jogging
a blow-dry
a car park
a campsite
le dancing
standing (adjective)
le living
a dance hall
luxury, deluxe
a living-room
Robert J. Hill in A Dictionary of False Friends (Meeds, 1982) lists
smoking as the term used for UK English dinner jacket (US English
tuxedo) in Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, Dutch, Danish,
Norwegian, Swedish, Turkish, Greek and Arabic. I suspect that there are
also many more.
Sometimes an English word is shortened and the new shortened form
is applied to the same thing or concept as the original longer word. Korean
is a particularly avid shortener of English loan words, and by so doing
creates an alarming number of false friends for the learner of English or
Korean to beware of. Examples (showing the Korean word transliterated
into the closest English word) and the corresponding meaning in Korean
are listed below:
Korean
Super
Sign
English
Supermarket
Signature
Korean
stainless
health
English
stainless steel
health club
Over
Remote con
Driver
air con
Apart
Overcoat
remote control
Screwdriver
air conditioner
Apartment
miss
note
classic
machine
mistake
notebook
classical music
sewing machine
And it is not just Korean that uses shortening in its borrowings from
English. French, for example, uses spot for English spotlight and le foot
for football.
Allied to this type of loan word false friend are pseudo-Anglicisms
where a language creates or adapts an English-looking word and applies it
to something more or less predictable. For example, in German ein Handy
is a mobile phone, although there is no such thing as a handy in English
itself. Similarly, autostop is the French term for the activity of hitchhiking,
doping is cheering in Polish, and in Swedish a freestyle is a personal
stereo. These are not, strictly speaking, false friends, of course, because
they have only very tenuous deceptive cognates in English, usually in a
different part of speech, but their apparent Englishness can still elicit
misplaced trust in the user. For example, a German learner of English
might well refer to the contraceptive pill as the antibabypill based on
misplaced trust in the pseudo-Anglicism used in German Antibabypille.
An added problem with some loan word false friends is that they often
denote an object or concept in the same general semantic area of the
lexicon, thus increasing their deceptive trustworthiness. They may have a
broader, more general, meaning or a narrower, more specific meaning, but
the problem is that they are more than likely to turn up in the same context
as their false cognate. Some examples from Korean illustrate the potential
for confusion:
Korean
Rouge
Manicure
Mansion
Hiking
Hip
English
lipstick
nail polish
luxury
cycling
buttocks
Korean
one piece
cassette
apartment building
stove
English
dress
cassette recorder
office building
heater
As with all of the false friends discussed in this series of articles the
only real solution is to be aware of them, to look out for them, and to learn
them. Teachers of English, particularly to beginners, need to raise learners’
awareness of the existence of English-origin words in their mother tongues
and, most importantly, of the fact that some can be trusted and some
cannot. The French learner of English needs to be introduced to the fact
that among the English words he/she already knows football does indeed
mean football, but foot does not. Native speakers of South Asian languages
need to be warned that while hotel does mean hotel in English, it does not
also mean café or restaurant as it does as a loan word in their mother
tongue.
Writers of courses and reference books for learners of English, too,
need to be particularly careful to cover this facet of the English language;
the fact that, these days, everybody knows a surprising number of English
words but very few people know exactly what they mean in English.
And those of us who come into contact with non-native-speakers in
the course of our daily lives need to be sensitive to the fact that
misunderstandings can arise as a result of their using a borrowed word
with its post-borrowing meaning. And if a speaker of a South Asian
language offers to show you his backside, remember that he almost
certainly means his back garden!
Bibliography
1. Ayto, John, Making Sense of Foreign Words in English, Edinburgh,
W & R Chambers Ltd. 1991
***
2. A Dictionary of European Anglicism – A Usage Dictionary of
Anglicism in Sixteen European Languages, ed. Manfred Görlach
(CUP), 2001
***
3. Dictionary of English Language and Culture, Longman, Group
UK, 1992
4. Learner English, eds. Michael Swan & Bernard Smith (CUP), 2001
5. Official Journal, C 1 of 03.01.1998
6. ***The Merriam Webster Dictionary, New Edition, Springfield,
Massachusetts, USA, 1999