2.6 False friends — the 60 words that will trip you — Epoché
What you will be able to do Identify French words most likely to mislead an English reader, and give the true French meaning of each rather than the English one you would have assumed. Use the three worst of them correctly: the word for a bookshop that is not a library, the adverb that means currently and not actually , and the adjective that means sensitive and not sensible . Run a four-step check on any word you suspect, so that you can catch a false friend you have never been warned about. Say which kinds of word are most likely to betray you, and therefore where to slow down. Prerequisites : 2.5 — you should already be able to split a learned word at its seam and run the four correspondences of the learned layer; see 2.5 Cognates if you need it. Five lessons have argued that you should trust your eye. This one takes that trust back exactly where it is not earned, and it is the most important lesson in the volume for that reason. A learner who cannot read cognates is slow. A learner who reads them without checking is confidently wrong, and confident wrongness is harder to fix than ignorance, because nothing in the situation tells you to look again. The technical name for these words is false friends , and the metaphor is exact. They are not strangers; they are words you feel you know, which is what makes them dangerous — a word you do not recognise sends you to the dictionary, and a word you wrongly recognise does not. Some are merely embarrassing. Some will make you say the opposite of what you meant in a job interview, and one of them, read as English, produces a sentence that is unexpectedly rude or bizarre in the middle of a conversation about jam. There are three reasons they exist, and two were described earlier in this volume: either English borrowed the word and then shifted it further than the narrowing described in 2.4, or both languages took the same Latin word and specialised it differently. A few more are not relatives at all: two unrelated words simply ended up with the same spelling. Neither language did anything wrong. They simply stopped agreeing, and in about sixty common cases the disagreement is large enough to cause a real misunderstanding. The rule The check is four steps, and it is deliberately cheap, because a check you will not perform is worth nothing. The whole thing takes a few seconds and you should run it whenever the little alarm goes off. Notice the feeling of certainty. This is the step people leave out, and it is the only one that is actually difficult. A false friend feels like a word you know, so the signal to check is not confusion — it is confidence about a word you have never been taught. Treat that feeling as the alarm. Ask whether the sentence is slightly odd. Substitute the English meaning and read the whole sentence again. False friends nearly always leave a residue: a sentence that is grammatical but strange, or unexpectedly rude, or oddly specific. If a French sentence seems to be telling you something peculiar, suspect the cognate before you suspect the speaker. Check the part of speech and the little words. Many false friends give themselves away grammatically. If a word you read as an English adjective has le in front of it, or a word you read as a noun is followed by à , your reading is wrong whatever the meaning would have been. The word behind English assist takes à and means attend ; the word behind attend takes no preposition and means wait for . The pair have swapped. Look it up, and look up the opposite direction too. When you find that a word does not mean what you thought, immediately find out what the French word for your English meaning actually is. Otherwise you will fix the reading and keep the error in your speaking, which is the worse half. Step four is the one learners skip, and skipping it is why the same mistake survives being corrected. Knowing that the French word for a bookshop is not library does not tell you what to say when you want a library; you have to learn the other word in the same breath, or the gap will be filled with the wrong one. The eight that matter most These eight are here because they are common, because the wrong reading produces a sentence that makes sense, and because in several cases the consequence is not a small one. Each is shown in a sentence from the corpus where the word is used in its real French meaning. French English La librairie est ouverte. [1] The bookstore is open. Actuellement, j'habite à Pékin. [2] I currently live in Beijing. Il est trop sensible. [3] He is too sensitive. J'ai assisté au séminaire. [4] I attended the seminar. As-tu demandé le prix ? [5] Did you ask the price? Cet oiseau est blessé. [6] This bird is injured. Ce pain est délicieux. [7] This bread is delicious. C'est une location. [8] It's a rental. Take them in order. The first is a bookshop, a place that sells books; a library, which lends them, is a different word built on the Greek word for book with a different ending. The second means at present , and it is very common, so reading it as actually will misdate a great many sentences you read; the French for actually is a short phrase meaning in fact . The third means sensitive , easily hurt — so calling a French colleague this is a comment on their feelings, not on their judgement. The French for sensible is the word meaning reasonable. The fourth and fifth are verbs whose English look-alikes point the wrong way. The French verb resembling assist means to be present at, to attend; the French verb resembling demand means simply to ask, and it is the ordinary neutral word for asking, with none of the force of English demand . So a French speaker asking you a question is doing something much politer than the English cognate suggests, and an English speaker who wants to demand something and reaches for this verb will be much milder than they intended. The sixth means to wound, to injure, or to hurt someone's feelings — the opposite end of the emotional range from