False friends and lexical borrowing: A linguistic analysis of false friends between English and Arabic

Abstract

This theoretical study aims at raising awareness of the existence of lexical false friends (FFs) in English and Arabic as genetically unrelated languages. It also provides a general categorization for FFs from a semantic point of view. A sample of more than fifty FF pairs is examined by contrasting their form, pronunciation and meaning. The analysis reveals that English Arabic FFs are of two types: Chance FFs (occur by coincidence) and semantic FFs(exist via lexical borrowing), the former being more frequent than the latter. This taxonomy is in line with those introduced by Chamizo-Domínguez (2008) and Roca-Varela (2015). Semantic FFs can be total (due to semantic shift, ellipsis, or figurative extension) or partial (through the process of semantic narrowing). Chance FFs are more problematic in the sense that they cause various degrees of embarrassment and confusion due to the fact that some constituents of FF pairs involve taboo and offensive words. Thus, such lexical FFs are considered potential agents that may create misunderstanding, miscommunication and confusionamong L2 learners.

A comparative lexical analysis of vehicle spare parts terms in Arabic

“…Therefore, they represent two cases of both lexical borrowing and false friends (cf. Al-Athwary, 2021). Furthermore, the word rumma:n can be also mistakenly treated as an example of metaphorical extension, which is not at all.…”

“…First of all, se:fu:n has another totally different meaning that has nothing to do with vehicle vocabulary; it comes to mean “the toilet box,” and thus constitutes a false friend with the other se:fu:n used in the language of mechanics (cf. Al-Athwary, 2021, p. 375). Second, in mechanics' jargon of SA, the word se:fu:n is only used to refer to one type of car filters, that is “the engine oil filter”; for other types of filters, the loan filtar is used such as filar ʔal-mukayyif “the filter of car air conditioning,” filtar ʔal-gi:r “the filter of gear box.” However, the word filtar may be sometimes used instead of se:fu:n .…”

False Cognates and Friends between English and Kurdish

“…However, there are also studies that have specifically addressed the issue. These studies are often contrastive showing lists of false friends (e.g., Hojati et al, 2013;Al-Athwary, 2021).…”

“…The theoretical studies either focus on semantic shifts, etymological aspects, and the birth of words in different languages (Chamizo Domínguez & Nerlich, 2002) or concentrate on the morphological similarity and assume that some false friends stem from coincidental or deceptive word similarity between two languages (Hayward & Moulin, 1984) Practical studies have been carried out in the areas of language learning, language teaching, language acquisition, and translation. They often serve a pedagogical function and use various instruments for the data collection such as dictionaries, word lists, word vector, corpora, document review, glossaries, and contrastive analysis (Uzun & Saliihoglu, 2009;Talebinejad & Sarmazeh, 2012;Hojati et al, 2013;Castro et al, 2018;Hilu, 2018;Al-Athwary, 2021).…”

“…False friends have been investigated between the dialects of the same language (Roca-Varela, 2011), between two languages (Roca Varela, 2012;Hojati et al, 2013;Yaylaci & Argynbayev, 2014;Al-Athwary 2021), or among a number of languages (Chamizo Domínguez & Nerlich,2002;Mitkov et al, 2007;Kanojia, 2020).…”