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Nasty Little False Cognates! |
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Written by Gadiandi
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Friday, 22 September 2006 |
It's always nice to find words in another language that are really similar to the same word in another language you know (They're called cognates). However, you have to be careful when words look or sound like a word you know but really aren't. There is a short article about false cognates(False friends) on Omniglot:
"When learning a foreign language, you sometimes encounter false
friends: words that sound like words in your native language, but which
don’t mean the same thing. For example, the French word sensible means sensitive, not sensible. The French for sensible is prudent or sage. A Rathaus is not a home for German rats but a town hall. The Irish word for food, bia, sounds like beer - but beer is beoir or leann. The word pan
means bread in Spanish and Japanese, and sir or mister in Polish and
Ukrainian. And remember not to try to borrow books from a French or
Portuguese librairie, a Spanish librería or an Italian libreria - these words all mean book shop. A library is a biblioteca in Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, and a bibliothèque in French."
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