Hmm, the only time I learned about false cognates was when learning high school Spanish, so I assumed it meant two words that sound similar in different languages but have different meanings, rather than homonyms in the same language.
false cognate
A word in a language that bears a phonetic and semantic resemblance to a word in another or the same language but is not etymologically related to it and thus not a true cognate. Examples include English day/Portuguese dia, German Feuer/French feu (both meaning “fire”), Malay dua/Sanskrit द्व (dva) (both meaning “two”), and English dog/Mbabaram dog. Compare false friend.
false friend
A word in a language that bears a phonetic resemblance to a word in another language, often because of a common etymology, but has a different meaning. Examples include English parent/Portuguese parente (“relative”) and English embarrassed/Spanish embarazada (“pregnant”). Compare false cognate.
Yeah I’ve looked into wiki page for “false cognates” after leaving that reply, it would make sense to have a name for a situation where words from different languages sound similar and have similar definitions but are not etymologically related, but according to the wiki false cognates also can be words from the same language and I just don’t see the need to call them false cognates in this case, to my understanding they are called homonyms if they are identical in spelling and pronunciation but differ in etymology/definition, or homophones if they sound the same but are spelled differently. Vsauce made an awesome video on this topic a while ago.
False friends are for translators/interpreters, they are referred to as “translators’ false friends” because people make mistakes when making translations while having insufficient experience, like that example that you give with embarrassed and embarazada
I’m not a linguistics expert and this is just me offering an unsolicited layman’s opinion, but perhaps the nuance comes from whether or not one might still conceive of the words being related despite the acknowledged difference in definition?
For example, “bat” (the animal) and “bat” (the implement) are homonyms that are used to describe two clearly different things. But maybe one might think of “scale” being connected between its various uses when it is not. “Scale” (the measuring tool) uses plates which are similar to the flat plates of fish scales. Or that to “scale” a distance is like measuring a “scale” of height. Something like that.
Hmm, the only time I learned about false cognates was when learning high school Spanish, so I assumed it meant two words that sound similar in different languages but have different meanings, rather than homonyms in the same language.
Example: embarrassed and embarazado
Looking the above example up for spelling, I see it’s called a false friend, and perhaps I misunderstood false cognate (from here https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#false_cognate ) :
Yeah I’ve looked into wiki page for “false cognates” after leaving that reply, it would make sense to have a name for a situation where words from different languages sound similar and have similar definitions but are not etymologically related, but according to the wiki false cognates also can be words from the same language and I just don’t see the need to call them false cognates in this case, to my understanding they are called homonyms if they are identical in spelling and pronunciation but differ in etymology/definition, or homophones if they sound the same but are spelled differently. Vsauce made an awesome video on this topic a while ago.
False friends are for translators/interpreters, they are referred to as “translators’ false friends” because people make mistakes when making translations while having insufficient experience, like that example that you give with embarrassed and embarazada
I’m not a linguistics expert and this is just me offering an unsolicited layman’s opinion, but perhaps the nuance comes from whether or not one might still conceive of the words being related despite the acknowledged difference in definition?
For example, “bat” (the animal) and “bat” (the implement) are homonyms that are used to describe two clearly different things. But maybe one might think of “scale” being connected between its various uses when it is not. “Scale” (the measuring tool) uses plates which are similar to the flat plates of fish scales. Or that to “scale” a distance is like measuring a “scale” of height. Something like that.