Fake friend

This Japanese announcement tells visitors to send a ▸ (carta) his mother. The same characters mean "hygienic paper" in Chinese.

A false friend is a word from another language that resembles, in spelling or pronunciation, a word from the speaker's native language, but has a different meaning. In In the realm of meaning, a false friend is also called heterosemantic. The very term “false friend” is a semantic calque of the French faux-ami , and was first used by Koessler and Derocquigny in their 1928 book Les faux-amis ou les trahisons du vocabulaire anglais ('The False Friends or Betrayals of the English Vocabulary')..

Normally, false friends are cognates, and exceptionally they can be false cognates.

Many false friends are due to a common etymology that has derived different meanings in each language. Language students are often victims of the confusion caused by so-called false friends.

Examples

Typical examples are exit, which means 'exit', and not 'success', or actual, also in English, which means 'real', and not 'current'; remove, whose meaning is not 'remover', but 'remove', "subir, in French and subire, in Italian, meaning 'to suffer', and not 'to climb', or name, also in French, meaning 'number', and not 'name'; guardare, in Italian, which means 'to look at', and not 'to keep', or aceto, also in Italian, which means 'vinegar', and not 'oil'; or vassoura/vasoira, in Portuguese and Galician, which means 'broom', and not 'garbage'; or Tablecloth/tablecloth in German and Dutch meaning 'coat', or Gymnasium meaning 'preparatory institute& #39;; or pan in Dutch meaning 'pot', not bread to eat. One of the most frequent false friends are the words letter, in English, which means 'letter', but also 'letter', library which means 'library', but not 'bookshop'. Also command which means 'order or instruction', but not 'command' (military). In the case of similar languages like Italian, there are words that are spelled exactly the same but have a completely different meaning, for example 'donkey'; which in Italian means 'butter'.

There can be false friends in many language pairs. A particularly evident example from the Slavic linguistic area is the word listopad which means November in Polish and October in Croatian.^{[citation needed]}

Implications

Both false friends and false cognates can present difficulties for students of foreign languages, particularly when they are languages related to their mother tongue, since students are prone to linking the two words due to linguistic interference. For this reason, teachers commonly make recurring false friend lists to help their students to some extent.

Comedy sometimes includes paronomasias on false friends; when this occurs in certain circumstances, a cacophony is produced (from the Greek κακοφωνία, which means 'bad sonance').