Funny false friends

Post Reply New Topic

Well, home means ‘man’ in Catalan and dialectal, non-standard Portuguese (the standard form being homem, where the final -m generally isn’t pronounced as a consonant; it just means the preceding e is nasal). Neither is pronounced anything like the English word; much closer (according to Wiktionary) to the Finnish one, except with the h silent and without that funny thing at the end represented in IPA by a superscripted x

Esperanto zumo (‘buzz, hum’) and Spanish zumo (‘juice’). The leading z is pronounced differently; there are no voiced sibilants in modern Spanish.

Esperanto sumo (‘sum’) and Portuguese sumo (‘juice’). Pronounced almost the same, except you can’t tell a final, unstressed -o from a -u in spoken Portuguese, while you really should be able to in Esperanto.

English heifer and Spanish jefe (‘boss, chief’). Pronounced as closely as phonetics allows for non-rhotic English dialects.

I’ve just noticed this pair, after remembering a certain someone asking me online, “Is your girlfriend a heifer?”.

EDIT – On second thought, the non-rhotic pronunciation of English heifer is even closer to that of the feminine form jefa English has only one final, unstressed vowel to approximate both Spanish -e and -a, but it definitely sounds more like the latter to Spanish speakers.

Catalan estic (‘[I] am’, used roughly to describe a state, as opposed to an essence, for which the corresponding verb form is sóc; Catalan has two copulative verbs, like Spanish and Portuguese) and English stick. In eastern Catalan dialects, the leading e is pronounced as a schwa, certainly laxer than a Spanish unstressed initial e followed by an s, which makes the word sound closer to the English one than it could otherwise be expected to.

The English phrase speak a language sounds similar enough to Spanish pica [la] lengua ('[the/your/one's] tongue itches'; in childish speech, it can mean by itself 'my tongue is itching') for the following verse of "Galway Bay" to evoke an itching tongue ...

Catalan truita can mean both 'omelette' and 'trout'. Dialectal Portuguese truita (standard truta) means only 'trout'.

In fact, the h in hombre (and most other words with one in any position) has never been pronounced in Spanish. It's purely etymological and wasn't always used. Other instances of h were added for more fancy reasons, like preventing an i or u from being read as j (e.g., hielo, 'ice') or v (huevo, 'egg'; aldehuela, 'little village', diminutive of aldea, 'village'), respectively, when each of these pairs was still considered the same letter, its particular shape being a matter of context or style (compare English haue and vpon for modern have and upon), or to mark a hiatus between vowels which would otherwise form a diphthong (ahíto, 'suffering from indigestion'), before the accent took over this function (reír, 'to laugh'; nowadays, an h which isn't part of the digraph ch has no effect on pronunciation whatsoever, but it was left behind anyway in words where it was already in use when the accent was added).

The only kind of Spanish h which was ever pronounced after Romance languages differentiated from one another is the one coming from initial Latin f, usually revealed by cognates in other Romance languages retaining the latter consonant: hierro ('iron'), horno ('hearth'), hoz ('sickle'); compare French fer, four, faux (noun, unrelated to the homonymic adjective meaning 'false'); Portuguese ferro, forno, fouce/foice; Catalan ferro, forn, falç; Italian ferro, forno, falce. This loss of initial f is due to early Basque influence, which also affected the Gascon dialect of Occitan (in which the word festa 'party, festival', cognate to Spanish fiesta, is rendered as hesta). The f- became an aspiration, which later disappeared; ironically, for most of its existence, the aspiration was still written f-.