Re: What's it called?

jjllambias@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On 29 ene, 21:29, "dmitri mosier/iowa city, Iowa" <drm...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Is there a name for the phenomenon where one sequence of phonemes has
a (sometimes amusing) difference in meanings in two different
lanaguges? E.g. "ano" in Czech is "yes" whereas in Spanish it's
"anus."

Yes, they are called "false friends":
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend>

My concept of 'false friend' implies that the speaker of one of the languages has a basic grasp of the other and can be fooled by resemblance which it would be reasonable to expect. That is, since en 'family' is the same as pt 'família', it's reasonable to expect that en 'parent' is the same as pt 'parente' (while in fact pt 'parente' means 'relative'). Those particulars are what makes 'false friends' a useful cetegory. Conversely, no italian person with some grasp of english is expecting en 'late' to mean 'latte' ('milk'), so it may be false but it isn't taken as a friend, so it isn't a false friend - it's just a word that is similar written form. As in the original example.

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