
False Friends of the Slavist - striking
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/False_Friends_of_the_Slavist
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dsego
Fwiw, the Cr-Bo-Sb cluster is complete bullshit. Those meanings are not unique
for each country, I know all the meanings for all the words listed. Any
differences depend more on the regional usage or context.

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mistrial9
hmm I think the idea of wiki-anything is that you can contribute to improve
the content, when you have specific knowledge.

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jobigoud
I can't comment on Slavic false friends but I've found that for French-
English, Spanish-English and French-Spanish, if you really force yourself into
thinking the words in the correct accent, the "friendliness" disappears. As
the two words are pronounced differently they are thought of as their own
concepts, instead of related to each other. Say "Journey" vs "Journée", if
pronounced correctly they don't sound anything similar at all. We should
remember words as they are spoken with a strong accent. Maybe for false
friends it would be even better to exaggerate the accent.

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rerx
But the English word "journey" has precisely the same roots as today's French
"journée": A journey may have been a day's worth of traveling. A "journeyman"
was paid day by day.

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jobigoud
Maybe that's a good mnemotechnic device at first, but it adds an indirection
on top of a translation, which I think would be a bad habit to get from the
start. I would argue that it's better to forget about the connexion the two
words might have had in the past and embrace them as they are now. YMMV
depending on your goals with learning the language.

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umanwizard
But the point is, _journey_ and _journée_ are in fact etymological cognates,
despite one having shifted semantically. The fact that they're pronounced
differently is just a coincidence, and not related to the fact that they have
different meanings.

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jobigoud
I don't think it's a coincidence per se, the languages diverged a long time
ago and drifted away both in pronunciation and meaning.

My point is that false friends are blurring the border between the two
languages in your brain, they are confusing because they make you think of
something in the wrong language. A solution to reinforce the separation of
languages in your brain is to only think about them in the context of their
own language, as soon as possible.

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rerx
But my knowledge of Italian really helps my understanding of French and
Spanish, although all are foreign languages to me. False friends are an
exception; but apart from knowing some language generally is an aid to
learning another language if it is related.

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rdtsc
I am surprised by the number of "false friends" between Russian and Polish
[https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/False_Friends_of_the_Slavist/R...](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/False_Friends_of_the_Slavist/Russian-
Polish)

I'd listen to my Polish friend speaking and I'd think, I know what he is
saying because I hear familiar words, but then I get confused as they mean
different things.

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vertigolimbo
My favourite is russian ‘запомни’ and polish ‘zapomnij’ which sound very
similar but mean completely the opposite - ‘remember’ and ‘forget’.

One might think how through history one word got the opposite meaning.

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umanwizard
Also interesting (to me) are words that are clearly etymologically connected
yet mean something totally unrelated. E.g. French _pas_ meaning "not" and
Spanish _paso_ meaning "step".

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mirimir
For me, it's Romanian that sounds strange. Sometimes it sounds like Russian or
Czech to me. And other times like Spanish. Depending on the speaker, and my
frame of mind.

I do speak Russian, and a little Czech and Spanish, but not Romanian. It's my
vague understanding that Romanian is closer to Latin than other Romance
languages. But the accent can sound Slavic, even though the words are almost
Latin.

Also, Russian does have French and English loan words. And for ones that
overlap with Romanian, they sound a lot alike.

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zwirbl
I've observed Romanians talking with Italians in their respective language and
understanding each other mostly fine

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mirimir
That makes sense.

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nathias
False friends are a window into language differentiation, you can see how the
same word was used in a more general way or for more different senses and when
languages separated due to geography or politics each retained only a specific
part of the sense/contexts and began forming new...

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dron57
I read over the lists of Russian-Polish and Russian-Ukrainian and most of the
so called false friends are only false friends because one of the languages
may have more than one meaning for the word. The other meaning is still
similar enough to be recognizable.

