Funny false friends

Post Reply New Topic

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-.

If I remember correctly, in French, written, syllable-final s was kept for centuries after it stopped being pronounced, to mark the altered quality it left behind in the preceding vowel. By the time this convention was changed to using the circumflex accent instead (as in the name of the mathematician L'Hôpital, which was still spelled L'Hospital during his lifetime), this effect on the vowel was already disappearing, too, at least in many cases. I don't know exactly what the accent marks today, but I think it was removed a few years ago from some words in which it had no phonetic significance.

that word/syllable-final s thing is funny. it disappeared in french, it's in the process of disappearing in some spanish dialects, and i thought a similar effect also applied to my native dialect of portuguese (which is poorly documented, and is indistinctly mixed and alternated with standard language nowadays). but then i realized that in my dialect it has nothing to do with phonetics, and it's actually about inflection. it's just that we tend to only pluralize articles and demonstratives (the, these), while nouns and adjectives remain singular

the other blue house = a outra casa azul -> a otra casa azul
the other blue houses = as outras casas azuis -> as otra casa azul (not azui)

or maybe it did have something to do with phonetics at first (there are some words where a syllable-final s is dropped or vocalized: mesmo -> memo, mas -> mai) but then it got associated specifically with plurals (and became a grammatical feature governing inflection itself instead of just pronunciation), while the general s-dropping tendency stopped. but that's just my own theory, and i'm just guessing. i never really saw an explanation for this. it's something i've been curious about for a long time

false friends are a big problem when you speak either portuguese or spanish and you're learning the other one of those two languages (the same also applies to italian, but not as much). for the most part, portuguese and spanish are close to mutually intelligible (as long as you have enough exposure to the pronunciation, which is very different, and can vary from one dialect to another almost as much as from one language to the other). on one hand it means you practically have an "advanced" level of the other language from the beginning. on the other hand... it means it's often not easy to tell what you don't know

if you really look for it (or sometimes just by accident), you can come up with indefinitely long sequences of identical or nearly identical words (some are just coincidence, but most of them are actual cognates) which don't mean what you probably think it means, and there's a lot of room for confusion

one chain of words that i came across recently was this one:
(<spanish> = <portuguese> = <english>)

escritorio = escrivaninha = desk
oficina = escritório = office
taller = oficina = workshop
cubierto = talher = piece of cutlery

that was a rather short chain though (escribanía = escrivaninha = desk, and cubierto = coberto = covered). i remember thinking of longer ones, but i can't think of any off the top of my head right now

there's always the classic one that gets all native portuguese speakers who aren't familiar with basic english...



in portuguese, if you were supposed to pull the door, the sign would read "puxe", which is pronounced almost exactly the same way as "push". it never ceases to be confusing, really. to make matters worse, (spanish) empujar = (english) push. which is doubly confusing because it does sound a lot like (portuguese) empurrar, and it does mean the same thing, but portuguese x usually corresponds to j in spanish, so it's like it's equivalent to "empuxar" (which, as it turns out, does exist in portuguese and i didn't even know. and it does mean the opposite of "puxar"). AGH, MY HEAD!!

I remember reading a bit about the dropping of the plural -s marker in popular Brazilian Portuguese, and it seemed to be originally due to the influence of indigenous languages with no grammatical number agreement, which caused the speakers to feel that a single plural marker is enough in each noun phrase, usually attached to the first word in it. It also explains the loss of the -m which distinguishes some third-person plural verb forms from their singular counterparts, contributing to a process not unlike the one which led English to shed person and number inflection in verbs almost entirely, relying on personal pronouns to convey that information:

[eu] canto --> eu canto
[tu] cantas --> você canta
[ele/ela] canta --> ele/ela canta
[nós] cantamos --> a gente canta
[vós] cantais --> vocês canta
[eles/elas] cantam --> eles/elas canta

I don't know about the loss of -s in particular, very frequently used words, but it could be due to idiosyncratic developments unrelated to phonetic evolution, like English yeah, which seems to come from the now archaic yea (pronounced like modern yay, but used differently), rather than being yes with the -s dropped.

There is, however, one single Portuguese dialect in which final s is dropped as a general phenomenon: barranquenho. Unsurprisingly, it's spoken in a remote corner of southern Portugal bordering Spanish Andalusia (where Spanish isn't really in the process of dropping syllable-final s—the process was completed centuries ago, but you can hear the consonant being hesitantly pronounced today, especially in formal speech, due to the greater prestige of northern Spanish dialects, where it was never lost). Barrancos has strong cultural ties to Encinasola, which lies on the other side of the border, but much closer than any other Portuguese town.