LL-L "False friends" 2004.06.05 (01) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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L O W L A N D S - L * 05.JUN.2004 (01) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) N=Northumbrian
S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic V=(West)Flemish Z=Zeelandic (Zeêuws)
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From: Pat Reynolds <pat at caerlas.demon.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "False friends" 2004.06.04 (07) [E]

In message <007001c44ac7$98526320$abb78e8c at dental.washington.edu>,
Lowlands-L <lowlands-l at lowlands-l.net> writes
>do False Friends also commonly occur between contiguous speech forms? What
I
>mean are there False Friends, for instance, between Standard German and Low
>Saxon - two speech forms that will be spoken in the same place by the same
>person in different social contexts? The curious thing is that after some
>thought about this, I have not been able to come up with many examples, and
>I have thought of none in the Germanic languages.
I wonder if the West Midlands / Standard English pronunciation of the
'does not' contraction counts?  E.g. in West Midlands,
'I do see' means 'I don't see' - the pronunciation of 'do' (meaning
'don't') is with a very short o - very different from 'do' meaning
'do').

Some English dialects use 'fester' or 'fester up', where standard
English has 'gather' or 'gather up' (fester in standard English means
something quite different).

In some parts of the North and West an 'urchin' is a flea-infested
animal (a hedgehog) not a flea-infested child.

And then there is the widespread use of 'learn' meaning 'to teach'.  I
would say this is more of a working class usage than a particular
dialect (it has a nice history, too).

Hoping that some of this will learn you what you wanted to learn,

Pat
--
Pat Reynolds
pat at caerlas.demon.co.uk
   "It might look a bit messy now,
                    but just you come back in 500 years time"
   (T. Pratchett)

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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: "False friends" [E]

> From: John Duckworth <jcduckworth2003 at yahoo.co.uk>
> Subject: False Friends
>
> Now, I began to wonder about something, and I need to phrase this
carefully:
> do False Friends also commonly occur between contiguous speech forms? What
I
> mean are there False Friends, for instance, between Standard German and
Low
> Saxon - two speech forms that will be spoken in the same place by the same
> person in different social contexts? The curious thing is that after some
> thought about this, I have not been able to come up with many examples,
and
> I have thought of none in the Germanic languages.

There's one problem to start with here - while long-standing "official"
languages like English and German may be good for word games, this sort of
thing is rather awkward in languages where neither spelling nor
pronunciation has ay official backing.

Also, sometimes a word is not only the false friend of a word in another
language, but because of the closeness and historical contacts between the
languages, the words falsely befriended also exist with the same meanings in
the other language. For example Scots "fit" (foot) is a false friend to the
English "fit" (eg "the shoe fit" or even in the sense of "seizure"), but the
English meanings of the word exist in Scots too. Whether this disqualifies a
word as a false friend I'm not sure - I don't really think it should,
though, since the language-learning problem of false friends still exists
for these.

Anyway, some false friends between Scots and English (choosing the Scots
spelling variant which best aids the effect, and using only words that are
generally pronounced the same throughout the dialects of Scots):

grape (in Scots this means "garden fork").
greet (in Scots this means "weep").
fit (in Scots this means "foot").
gate (in Scots this means "road, way").
soup (in Scots this means "sweep").
girdle (in Scots this means "griddle").
shiver (in Scots this means "cold sore" - Scots for "shiver" would be
"chitter").
law (in Scots this means an isolated or dominant conical hill).
steer (in Scots this means "stir").
clap (in Scots this means "to pet").
canny (in Scots this means "calm, easy, laid back" - different from
Northumbrian).
braid (in Scots this means "broad").
lie (in Scots this means "a pool of stagnant water in a field").

And so on!

Sandy
http://scotstext.org/

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From: John Nelson <onlinelearning2 at yahoo.com>
Subject: LL-L "False friends" 2004.06.04 (07) [E]

To expand your "gift" example, in Danish, "gift" means
both "poison" and "married".  (Caution: don't chuckle
too much over that one in front of your spouse...)
:0)

Regards,

John Nelson
Rocky Mountains, USA

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