LL-L "False friends" 2004.06.05 (09) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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L O W L A N D S - L * 05.JUN.2004 (09) * 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: Stella en Henno <stellahenno at hetnet.nl>
Subject: LL-L "False friends" 2004.06.04 (07) [E]

> From: John Duckworth <jcduckworth2003 at yahoo.co.uk>
> Subject: False Friends
>
> Dear Lowlanders,
>
> I was writing something the other day about 'False Friends' (Faux Amis)
> between different languages; you must all be aware of so many of them,
like
> 'gift' in English, meaning 'a present', and 'Gift' in German, meaning
> 'poison' -a totally false friend, while others are partially false - thus,
> French 'voyage' is any journey, while the English 'voyage' is only a
journey
> by sea.
>
> 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.
>
> John Duckworth
> Preston, UK

(Westerlauwer) Frisian and Dutch have quite a few, among which:
slim (F) (bad, serious) vs slim (D) (clever) vs slim (Eng).
BTW this "slim" in the Frisian meaning alos occurs in Low Saxon dialects
(both in Dutch and German parts) and correspond to German "schlimm" of
course.

lucht in Dutch means both sky and smell, while in Frisian "lucht" only means
smell.
faaks in Frisian means "maybe" while in Dutch "vaak" (not quite identical
but almost) means "often".
One that occurred with an ex-girlfriend visiting my grandmother, who
remarked "wat moast no mei sokken?" (=what is one to do with such (people),
when someone had an opinion she disagreed with) on which the ex said
"aantrekken" (put them on) (in Dutch), because she confused it with Dutch
"sokken" (socks). In fact sokken [sOk at n] (socks) and sokken [sok at n] (such
people) form a minimal pair in Frisian for the phonemes [o] and [O], but
this distinction is not heard by most Dutch (there these too do not
constitute separate phonemes).
Similarly we have bolle [bol@] which means "bull" which sounds to Dutch as
bolle (round, inflected form), which in Frisian would be bolle [bOl@] with
the other phoneme...
A classic is "net" which in Frisian means "not" and in Dutch "just about",
giving rise to jokes about Dutch people trying to sail under a bridge with a
Frisian saying "it kin net" (it is impossible, literally "it cannot"), which
the Dutch interpreting wrongly ...

Henno Brandsma

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: False friends

Henno (above):

> A classic is "net" which in Frisian means "not" and in Dutch "just about",
> giving rise to jokes about Dutch people trying to sail under a bridge with
a
> Frisian saying "it kin net" (it is impossible, literally "it cannot"),
which
> the Dutch interpreting wrongly ...

These are false friends within Lowlands Saxon (Low German), between
dialects.  _Net_ (<nett>) is 'just about' in Eastern Friesland dialects,
'nice', 'friendly', etc., in other dialects (as in German, related to
"neat," French _net_, Italian _netto_, etc., 'pure').  (It is also a
homophone in German dialects in which _net_ means 'not'.)

Talking about "false friends" ...  This reminds me of an Australian friend
trying to learn Hebrew, her first (and unsuccessful) non-Indo-European
language learning attempt, feeling very frustrated and exclaiming, "What a
silly language in which 'me' is 'who', 'who' is 'he', and 'he' is 'she'!"

NB: Hebrew _mi_ (< _miy_) מִי 'who?', _hu_ (< _huw’_) הוּא 'he', _hi_ (< hiy
’_) הִיא 'she'
(cf. respectively: Arabic _mâ_ مَا ~ _man_ مَنْ, _huwa_ هُوَ, _hiya_ هِ٠َ;
Maltese _min_, _huwa_ [u'wa], _hiya_ [i'ja])

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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