• rumschlumpel@feddit.org
    9·
    6 days ago

    Yeah, false friends (loan words that don’t mean what they mean in the original language) are super common.

    Edit: The definition I gave is wrong, or rather too narrow. Wikipedia says this:

    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.

      • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
        2·
        6 days ago

        Mixing those up would certainly be embarassing, though :D

        Example from German: “sensible” is not “sensibel”

        also “handy” and “Handy”