Talk:False friend

message: This largely unreferenced article turned into an example farm magnet. Therefore I trimmed it severely. There are whole dictionaries of false friends. Please do not add more examples, unless they illustrate some new phenomenon with false friends. Please do not add nonnotable examples. Nearly every word of greek or latin root generated false friends. Staszek Lem (talk) 17:24, 4 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Good!--Bob Mudford (talk) 07:31, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Example farm 

message: :
Clarify: did Dutch neger fade from use because of the English taboo, or take on the offensive connotations of nigger but remain in use, or what? —Tamfang (talk) 23:32, 4 April 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not really a valid example at all; regardless what the answer to the above question is, it's now offense if Dutch, too, so it's not a false friend. In former times, the English word was simply a neutral mispronunciation of "negro" by illiterate US southern whites, so back-when they weren't false friends either. The fact that the cognate words shifted from neutral to offensive at not precisely the same rate doesn't make them false friends. No cognates shift in meaning in multiple languages at precisely the same rate, even in the Internet era.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  08:19, 22 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dutch ''neger'' 

message: :
The meaning of "American Italian" is not as obvious as one might prefer.  I guess it means "Italian as spoken in North America"; if so, it would be better to say that.  (I assume that Italian as spoken in Latin America, which could as reasonably be called "American Italian" by analogy with "American Spanish", has not been influenced in the same way!) —Tamfang (talk) 01:32, 5 April 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Farm example 

message: :
This whole paragraph is oddly phrased. What region is being referred to? "usually cereals in general"? That last line also goes on far too long.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.5.189.96 (talk) 11:50, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  corn paragraph 

message: On 9 May 2015, there was an unexplained edit to the effect that "to root" is used also in British English to mean "to support".
My reversion (26 June 2015) of that change has twice been reversed by user Rsrikanth05, first with no explanation, then with an explanation "Removed British English on the basis of an assumption that an IP claims so. Please discuss".
It is difficult to see how we can approach an agreement where changes are made with no explanation (as on 9 May and in Rsrikanth05's first reversion) or where the explanation is confused (as in Rsrikanth05's second reversion, in this case to the extent that it describes the opposite of the change which he/she has made and where the rest of the description appears to make no sense).  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mike Shepherd (talk • contribs) 05:38, 26 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unexplained edits 

message: I'm not sure this is really correct to say it is largely obsolete in English. Although there's a link to magazine (firearms), when I worked for a large defence company all of well anything that could blow you up basically was stored in a magazine, i.e. there were buildings known rather prosaically as the Eastern Magazine and the Western Magazine. They weren't the little portable magazines for carrying bullets etc in but rather large buildings with various dugouts etc in case anything exploded (fortunately it never did). That wider sense of a storehouse for ammunition, gunpowder, plastic explosives, ballistic missiles and whatnot really is more closer to the idea of a magazine as a store, and I'm surprised to read it is mostly obsolete in English. What do others think? Si Trew (talk) 08:08, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  magazine 

message: The article is shot through with original research and unsourced assertions.  This is understandable, because everybody feels like an expert in their native language (and sometimes, others as well).  However, Wikipedia's core principle of verifiability is clear on this point:  and that   It should be noted that adding an inline citation consisting of a dictionary definition of one or both words in a false-friends pair, verifies each of their meanings, but does not verify their status as false friends unless the source says so.  To assume they are false friends from the reading of two dictionary entries where the source does not explicitly make that assertion, is WP:SYNTH and not permitted.
I plan to start removing content that is unsourced.  This may mean large chunks of text, including perhaps entire, large tables of word pairs in other languages, and other unsourced or invalidly sourced material.  Examples of false friend pairs should be sourced to a reference which mentions the term false friends, or something similar, or they are subject to removal.  Please be sure when adding text to the article, that you include valid, reliable sources from secondary sources that substantiate the claims. Mathglot (talk) 11:30, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Removed the tables of Spanish-English, and Japanese-English word pairs.  These were linked to wiktionary definitions, but it's WP:SYNTH to presume that different meanings for, say, a Spanish and an English word pair that are spelled the same or similarly means they are False friends.  It's not enough to have two references, one that defines each word of the pair: you need to find one reference, that claims that a word pair are false friends. Mathglot (talk) 07:44, 22 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removal of OR and unsourced material 

message: Who said "demandar" only means "to sue"? I think it also means "to demand" in the sense of "to request", or have you never heard of the expression "video/vídeo bajo demanda" ("video on demand", commonly abbreviated as "VoD")? --Fandelasketchup (talk) 14:52, 27 March 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed; be bold; remove it. Mathglot (talk) 11:07, 28 March 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wrong information in article 

message: Is it just another synonym for homonymy? 
Or there's something else??
2409:4060:2083:1D68:0:0:20E1:B8AC (talk) 18:20, 27 July 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi. Article talk pages are devoted to improving the article, and are not a forum for discussing the topic. You can ask that question at the Reference desk if you want. Mathglot (talk) 00:25, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why it is different from homonymy and homoglyphy??? 

message: A person learning another language can come across a compound word, and translate the parts individually into their own language. However, this apparent meaning could be very different from the true meaning. For example, in Dutch bumperklever translates part-for-part as "bumper sticker", but actually means "tailgater". Is there a term for this kind of false friend, and is it covered in sources at all? Rua (mew) 17:41, 3 January 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: It isn't a kind of false friend, because the word doesn't exist in English. It's an interesting question, though. On the other hand, a lot of the time it will be silly nonsense; try botervlieg (vlinder; get it?), hoogweg, rijdeweg , groenhuis (broeikas), rietjebes (aardbei), and so on.  Try the Reference desk, though. Mathglot (talk) 00:43, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  But those words don't actually exist in Dutch. A "bumper sticker" is something in English on the other hand, so there is a real possibility for confusion. Rua (mew) 11:03, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  That's my whole point. But the parts exist, and you understand them. I don't know what the class including words like bumperklever would be called. Anyway, since it's not really a false friend issue, it's kind of off-topic here. Maybe WT:LANG could help. Mathglot (talk) 11:50, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  False friends by meaning rather than sound/appearance? 

message: As a native German speaker I‘d like to mention that the example „See“ is not 100 percent correct. „See“ indeed means lake but only in the male form „der See“.
If the female version is used („die See“) its meaning changes to „sea“.
Therefore its not always a false friend.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2003:F0:870A:3E00:FC71:D19D:C436:16E3 (talk) 11:45, 13 December 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Example „See“ 

message: :The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 
The result of the move request was: No consensus.   EdJohnston (talk) 04:33, 2 February 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: False friend →  – As per Wikipedia:Naming conventions (plurals), articles about groups or classes of specific things are to be titled in plural form. That's the case in the present article, in which "false friends" appears ten times while the singular form only appears twice. Even the first sentence is contorted to fit in the singular form: "a false friend is either of two words" would be simply "false friends are two words". In a previous request , the most substantial objection argued the "friendship" involves the translator and either word, not between the two words. But even so, there is always a pair of words involved in the concept of false friends. fgnievinski (talk) 01:37, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Requested move 25 January 2023 

message: Needs a notion on "joke meaning" in one language versus serious meaning in another. Or could use one.
And here goes my runglishy example:
* In English, some people jokingly say "almonds activated" (see "That Activates My Almonds" meme). 
* In Russian, the word for a single almond - "mindalina" - is used for 2 kinds of glands in one's head: for tonsillae and for corpus amygdaloideum a.k.a. amygdala; where the latter is a gland in brain.
In my opinion, "almond activated" may be mistakengly translated as "amygdala activated" by a En-Ru translator unaware of the meme nature of the phrase.  81.89.66.133 (talk) 11:25, 1 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Needs a notion on "joke meaning" in one language versus serious meaning in another