faux amis

[Daniel Buncic]

Thanks a lot to John Dingley for advertising my site in this discussion
group. I would like to reply to Danko Sipka's remarks and to Uladzimir
Katkouski's harsh criticism.

The site is the project of a student (i.e. me, four years ago) who built it
up on his own within the framework of his master thesis, in four months'
time (and due to a lecturer position and a PhD thesis on something
completely different, there has not been much time to maintain the site
afterwards). Of course this student, himself a native speaker of German,
did not have near-native command of fifteen Slavonic languages. Neither do
I now. Consequently, most of the information is taken from dictionaries.
For the basic vocabulary of Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, and Ukrainian,
I can add my own speaking experience to the dictionary definitions. For
other languages I have to rely on them completely, being controlled only by
the aid of dozens of people who have contributed their knowledge and ideas
so far.
(They are listed at http://www.uni-bonn.de/~dbuncic/fauxamis/thanx_un.htm.)

The main problem is that most dictionaries are very bad. This is especially
true of Belarusian. So please, Mr Katkouski, if you have spotted mistakes
in "almost half" of my Belarusian examples, please tell me about them, and
I will correct them. And if you know "some very obvious and well-known"
examples I have missed so far, please let me know about them as well, I
will gladly add them. However, the example blago/blaho that you mention was
one of the first examples that went on-line, though in the form
blagoj/blahi. (I still remember that Lev Skvorcov at the "Moscow Literary
Institute" told me that one in 1999.)
(See http://www.uni-bonn.de/~dbuncic/fauxamis/rus_by_un.htm#ff137; the
order of the entries has been changed several times for technical reasons.)

Danko Sipka is right of course when he states that the number of examples
per language pair on my site is relatively small. If you are interested in
bilingual dictionaries with several hundreds of entries, please have a look
at the on-line bibliography on 'false friends' that I compiled (and
continue to maintain) together with Ryszard Lipczuk:
     http://www.uni-bonn.de/~dbuncic/ffbib/
Apart from linguistic articles and monographies about 'false friends', you
can find Danko Sipka's dictionary there of course (which I can warmly
recommend), as well as many others, even a Polish-Upper Sorbian false-
friends dictionary. However, there are printed dictionaries only for the
more popular language combinations. There is not, and probably will never
be, a printed Belarusian-Bosnian, Kashubian-Slovene, or Lower Sorbian-
Macedonian dictionary. Neither is there a comparative "pan-Slavic"
dictionary of 'false friends', and the "monolingual" lists as well as the
semasiological maps on my site seem to be quite unique, too.

The project does not have lofty scientific aims but merely arose from
interest. If you share this interest, have fun with it!

Daniel Buncic
http://www.uni-bonn.de/~dbuncic/

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