faux amis

[Danko Sipka]

The site is certainly interesting. Let me add a word of caution. The site
lists only a small fragment of the existing Slavic "faux amis". If you take
a look at the bilingual faux amis, their number does not exceed one hundred
in any of the pairs. In reality, the number of such pairs is closer to one
thousand than one hundred (not true for language variants, such as between
Serbian and Croatian). Several years ago I have compiled, with a group of
collaborators, Serbian - Polish Dictionary of Interlingual Homonyms and
Paronyms (published as: Danko Sipka (red.) Slownik serbsko-polskich
homonimów i paronimów, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 1999). We adopted very
strict criteria of differentiating between faux amis on the one hand (as a
psycholinguistic category) and interlingual homonyms and paronyms (as
contrastive lexicological category) and our inclusion criteria were quite
selective. Even with such approach, the number of pairs in the dictionary is
645. Interestingly enough, the number of such pairs between English and
Slavic langauges is approximately the same. I have compiled such database
for the English - Serbo-Croatian (aka BCS, Bosniac, Bosnian, Croatian,
Montenegrin, Serbian, and Vojvodinian) pairs. Their number is approximately
the same (some 700 pairs) as between Slavic languages. I was quite surprised
to see this. The main reason is that the borrowings from Latin tend to
undergo different metaphorical extensions in English on the one hand and
Slavic languages on the other.
Best,


Danko Sipka
Associate Professor Research and Acting Director
Critical Languages Institute (http://cli.la.asu.edu)
Arizona State University
E-mail: Danko.Sipka at asu.edu
Web: http://www.public.asu.edu/~dsipka
Phone: (480) 965 7705

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Dingley" <jdingley at YORKU.CA>
To: <SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU>
Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2003 8:37 AM
Subject: [SEELANGS] faux amis


> Hi,
>
> I would like to draw attention to the following site dealing with
> Slavic "faux amis":
>
> http://www.uni-bonn.de/~dbuncic/fauxamis/
>
> John Dingley
>
> ------------
> http://dlll.yorku.ca/jding.html
>
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