Re: term for similarly-spelled words

Christopher Ingham wrote:
On Sep 2, 5:27 pm, António Marques<ento...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2 Set, 18:32, Christopher Ingham<christophering...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Sep 2, 11:12 am, John Atkinson<johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

... "faux amis" (which may or may not be cognates, but have the property of

sounding or looking like they might be)....

Weren't faux amis themselves originally more restricted in what they
meant,

No.

i.e. they had to be cognates and have orthographic similarity,
and locutionary similarity was not a consideration?

No. Why would such elaborated concepts be part of something as simple
and straightforward to understand as 'false friends'?

If true,

It's false.

"'faux ami.' Also 'false friend.' A term in language teaching for a
word that has the same origin and general appearance as a word in
another language...." [T. McArthur, in_The Oxford Companion to the
English Language_(1992), s.v. "faux ami"].

'The Oxford Companion to the English Language' is wrong.

then the
term with its broader scope of meaning (spelled similarly but may or
may not be cognates; similarity of pronunciation) has progressively
developed into being a less precise concept, a sort of grab bag term
which in each instance of use requires further clarification (if not
readily apparent) as to the particular attributes its describing.

'Developed'? 'Requires'? For Christ's sake, false friends are words
that are likely to be misinterpreted by learners, and they're likely
to be misinterpreted because they resemble something that the learner
already knows (that's why they're 'friends') and yet do not have the
meaning that the learner would be justified in assuming (that's why
they're false). They've been that from day one, they were that mid
way, they are that today and they'll be that a thousand years from
now. It's a thoroughly simple concept to grasp, in which there is
nothing of imprecision.

The fact that some false friends are cognates while others aren't
doesn't bring any fuzziness into the concept of 'false friends', not
any more than the fact that some odd numbers are prime and some are
not makes the concept of 'odd number' imprecise.

"'False Friends.' This is a very large subject, and we can only try
to sketch out here some some principles that distinguish the various
types of false friend. The subject is so large that several books have
been devoted to it, either partially or wholly.... The false-friend
phenomenon reflects the essentially arbitrary assignment of the
signifier to the signified.... Batchelor and Offord's categorisation
(2000: 31) of what they call 'deceptive cognates', the technical term
for_faux amis_, is similar to that of Kirk-Greene; they distinguish
between the deceptive cognates proper, where the meanings of the word
in either language are quite unconnected, and partial deceptive
cognates, in which 'only part of the meanings of the word
coincides'" [N. Armstrong,_Translation, Linguistics, Culture_(2005),
78-9].
http://books.google.com/books?id=3BP07JkszlcC&pg=PA78&lpg=PA78&dq=This+is+a+very+large+subject,+and+we+can+only+try+to+sketch&source=bl&ots=TB3sZpZKDQ&sig=9rbKpo8bYrYI29617UPJ8wRbfq8&hl=en&ei=Q_ufSqPGG4_xnQemi_HxDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=This%20is%20a%20very%20large%20subject%2C%20and%20we%20can%20only%20try%20to%20sketch&f=false

....and?

You have also adamantly denied that false cognates can designate faux
amis:

"'false friends.' In comparative linguistics, a term describing words
in different languages which resemble each other in form, but which
express different meanings; also called 'false cognates,' and often
known by the French equivalent expression 'faux amis'" [D. Crystal,_A
Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics_, 5th ed. (2003), s.v. "false
friends"].

No, what I've said is that the people doing that either don't know english, don't know what cognates are, or shouldn't be coining terms in the first place.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: term for similarly-spelled words
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  • Re: Pseudo-cognates?
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