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An example of false friends in German and English. In linguistics, a false friend is a word in a different language that looks or sounds similar to a word in a given language, but differs significantly in meaning.
German speakers, especially teachers, often refer to pseudo-anglicisms as false friends, a translation of the German term that may itself count as a pseudo anglicism. [62] Beamer – a video projector [63] Bodybag – a messenger bag; Dressman – a male model (Onysko calls this the 'canonical example' of a pseudo-anglicism. [11])
The term "false cognate" is sometimes misused to refer to false friends, but the two phenomena are distinct. [1] [2] False friends occur when two words in different languages or dialects look similar, but have different meanings. While some false friends are also false cognates, many are genuine cognates (see False friends § Causes). [2]
False friends (or faux amis) are pairs of words in two languages or dialects (or letters in two alphabets) that look and/or sound similar, but differ in meaning.. False cognates, by contrast, are similar words in different languages that appear to have a common historical linguistic origin (regardless of meaning) but actually do not.
The popular German a cappella group Wise Guys produced a song on their Radio album called "Denglisch", a tongue-in-cheek look at the use of English words in German language. In the song, the lyrics start out mostly German with only a few English words creeping in: "Oh, Herr, bitte gib mir meine Sprache zurück!" (O Lord, please give me my ...
A popular humorous (but false) etymology of the word mof by the Dutch is that it is a German abbreviation meaning Menschen ohne Freunde ("people without friends"). Germany was known as Mofrika, an amalgamation of mof and Afrika, during WW2. [45]
Schadenfreude (/ ˈ ʃ ɑː d ən f r ɔɪ d ə /; German: [ˈʃaːdn̩ˌfʁɔʏ̯də] ⓘ; lit. Tooltip literal translation "harm-joy") is the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, pain, suffering, or humiliation of another. It is a loanword from German.
The words themselves are false friends to each other. From the first sentence of the article: "False friends are words in two languages (or letters in two alphabets) that look or sound similar, but differ significantly in meaning." It sounds like the false friends in Wikipedia's definition are the words themselves, not the translator.