faux amis

[Daniel Buncic]

Those who are NOT interested in the individual words, please go the summary
after the mark "==>>" (or just skip this whole message).

For those who are, here is my answer to Uladzimir Katkouski, in which I go
through those of my examples that he marked as "WRONG" (see
http://www.pravapis.org/art_false_friends.asp). As he made his list of
corrections public, I'm afraid I'll have to answer publically as well:

> 3. zhyvot - zhyvot - WRONG. Both have the same meaning.

What does that mean? Either Blr. _zhyvot_ has an archaic meaning 'life',
too, or R. _zhivot_ has not. Neither the "Belaruska-ruski slounik" (Moskva
1962, Minsk 1988, hereafter BRS) nor Marcineuski and Sadouski's
"Njamecka-belaruska-ruski slounik" (Minsk 1988, hereafter NBRS) give 'life'
as a meaning of Blr. _zhyvot_ (or _zhyvot_ as a translation for _Leben_).
However, I found now that the "Tlumachal'ny slounik belaruskaj movy" (Minsk
1978, hereafter TSBM) does indeed attest this archaic meaning. Consequently,
I have corrected this.

> 7. prosta - prosto - Now both meanings are used (direct and simple), so
it's not really faus amis

No, I have never heard a Russian say "Idite napravo, nalevo, a potom prosto"
instead of "prjamo". (A Russian I know almost went crazy when he had lost
his way in Poland and after dozens of "lefts" and "right" he was told that
it was all so "prosto" - easy. He understood what Polish _prosto_ really
means only when he had almost reached the border.) But the BRS attests
"idzice prosta, potym zvjarnice naleva", which is translated as "idite
prjamo, potom svernite nalevo".

> 8. nahly - naglyj - Well, "nahly" is definately a "polonizm" and you would
hardly encounter it in literature

Okay, so should I mark this word as non-existing in Belarusian? I only see
that it is even in the 1962 Moscow edition of the BRS, which is not very
likely to be polonophile. (It is marked as "regional" though, and I will now
add this label.)

> 9. matka - matka - WRONG. Both have the same meaning.

That would mean that either Blr. _matka_ does not mean 'mother' (which is
given as its first definition by both TSBM and BRS), or Russian _matka_
means 'mother' as well, which I doubt. Which of these alternatives do you
mean?

> 10. duma - duma - ALSO WRONG.

You could have clarified this a bit, as there are three meanings in two
languages involved. But you are indeed right that this is wrong. Though the
bilingual dictionaries do not give the meaning 'folk song', I now found this
meaning in TSBM. I have corrected this.

> 16. leta - leto - WRONG. Both have the same meaning. Actually, it's in
Belarusian that this archaic meaning was better preserved ("letas" - last
year; "sioleta" - this year; "pazaletas" - the year before the last year)

I do not talk here about Blr. _letas_, R. _trexletnij_ or any other words,
but only about _leta_/_leto_. These do not mean 'year' neither in Russian
nor in Belarusian as far as I can see. But in Russian there is a suppletive
use of forms of _leto_ in the plural paradigm of _god_, e.g. in _30 let_ '30
years'. This corresponds to Blr. _30 hadou_, not *_30 let_. (I added this
suppletive function only some days ago after Paul B. Gallagher told me that
otherwise my map made Slovene, in which _leto_ means only 'year', "look like
some odd pariah", and he was right.)

> 20. kraska - kraska. WRONG. There is no word "kraska" in Belarusian. It's
"farba" (die Farbe)

I did not say that Blr. _kraska_ was a word for 'colour'. Quite to the
contrary: if you look at the list thoroughly, it says explicitly that R.
_kraska_ corresponds to Blr. _farba_, just as you say. But _kraska_ is a
Belarusian word for 'flower', which is marked as colloquial by the BRS (I'll
add this label now) but which seems to be in good use. (Google finds 289
hits for "KPACKI", most in this sense, and only few in the "trasjanka" sense
of the Russian cognate.) I do not agree that a word of that frequency does
not exist.

24. rasiejski - rasiejski - did not get what you wanted to say here?

In Russian, there is a clear distinction between _rossijskij_, which is the
adjective of the country and the state, and _russkij_, which is used in the
ethnic sense and about the language. However, the Belarusian adjective
_rasejski_ can be used in both senses. This is what one calls a 'partial
false friend'. A Belarusian who tries to translate his _pa-rasejsku_ into
Russian as *_po-rossijski_ instead of _po-russki_ goes wrong.

Thank you very much for your additions. I have added all I could, but I
encountered some problems:
- With your translation "holy father" you have been taken in by a 'false
friend' yourself. In English, in contrast to R. _svjatoj otec_, "Holy
Father" is exclusively the Pope. Normal priests are addressed as "father".
- _brak_/_brak_ has been on my personal list for years, but to make it
public I need to know what the Belarusian word for 'rejects, refuse, waste'
is, which is one of the meanings of the Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and
Bulgarian word. I have not been able to find that out so far.

Thank you also for the link to the Belarusian-Russian false-friends site,
which I have added to our on-line bibliography.

==>>
All in all, out of 28 examples you marked 8 as wrong. (I am not sure whether
29% qualifies as "almost half of them", but it is in fact "quite a few".)
However, so far I have felt obliged to correct only two of these eight cases
(which makes 7%). The others have to remain unchanged until you (or anyone
else) confirm
    1. that _nahly_ really does not exist in Belarusian, or
    2. that Blr. _matka_ does not mean 'mother'.

By the way, I have just linked Ryszard Lipczuk's and my online bibliography
to the false-friends lists in such a way that below every list you can now
find further information about 'real' dictionaries. In the case of
Russian-Belarusian, there is indeed a very exhaustive dictionary by
Hrabchykau from 1980. Those who are interested in long lists of bilingual
'false friends' find them there. My site is perhaps more for people
interested in the phenomenon all over the Slavia.

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

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------