False Friends and Loan Words

The practice of taking a word from a foreign language and introducing it into another is called 'borrowing' and the words thus 'borrowed' are known as 'Loan Words'.It's worth mentioning at the outset that no language takes a word with the intention of returning it one day.it's also important to understand that this is not a modern phenomenon brought about by globalization bu has always taken place whenever differnt language communities come into contact with each other.
A loanword can be called a borrowing.The abstract noun borrowing refers to the process of speakers adopting words from a source language into their native language.'Loan' and 'borrowing' are of course metaphors, because, in fact, there is no literal lending process.There no transfer from one language to another, and no 'returning'words to the source language.The words simply come to be used by a speech community that speaks a different language from the one these words originated in.
Borrowing is a consequence of cultural contact between two language communities.It can go in both directions between the two languages in contact,but often there is an asymmetry, such that more words go from one side to the other.In this case the source language community has some advantage of power prestige and/or wealth that makes the objects and the ideas it brings are desirable and useful to the borrowing language comunity. For instance,the Germanic tribes in the first few centuries A.D adopted numerous loanwords from Latin as they adopted new products via trade with the Romans.Few Germanic words, no the other hand passed into latin.
The actual process of borrowing is complex and involves many usage events(i.e. instances of use of the new word).Generally, some speakers of the borrowing language know the source language too, or at least enough of it to utilize the relevant word.They(often consciously) adopt the new word when speaking the borrowing language, for it most accuretly fits the idea they are trying to express.If they are bilingual in the source language, which is often the case, they might pronounce the words the same or similar to the way they are pronounced in the source language. For example, English speakers adopted the word garage from French, at first with a pronounciation nearer to French pronounciation than is now usually found. Presumably, the very first speakers who used the word in English knew at least some French and heard the word used by French speakers, in a French-speaking context.
Those first who use the new word might use it at first only with speakers of the source language who know the word, but at some point they come to use it with those to whom the word was not previously known. To these speakers the word may sound 'foreing'. At this stage, when most speakers do not know the word and if the hear it think it is from another language, the word can be called a foreign word. There are many foreign words and phrases used in English such as bon vivant (French), mutatis mutandis (Latin), and Fahrvergnuegen (german).
However, in time more speakers can become familiar with a new foreign word or expression. The community of users of this word can grow to the point where even people who know little or nothing of the source language understand, and even use, the novel word themselves. The new word becomes conventionalized: part of the conventional ways of speaking in the borrowing language. At the point we call it a borrowing or loanword.
It should be noted that not all foreign words do become loanwords; if they fall out of use before they become widspread, they do not reach the loanword stage.
Concventionalization is a global process in which a word progressively permeates a larger and larger speech community, becoming part of ever more people's linguistic repertoire. As part of its becoming more familiar to more people, a newly borrowed word gradually adopts sound and other characteristics of the borrowing language as speakers who do not know the source language accommodate it to their own linguistic system. In time, people in the borrowing community do not perceive the word as a loanword at all. Generally, the longer a borrowed word has been int the language and the more frequently it is used it resembles the native words of the language.
English has gone through many periods during which large numbers of words from a particular language were borrowed. These periods coincide with times of major cultural contact between English speakers and those speaking other languages. The waves of borrowing during periods of especially strong cultural contacts are not sharply delimited, and can overlap. For example, the Norse influence on English began already in the 8th century A.D. and continued strongly well after the Norman Conquest brought a large influx of Norman French to the language.

It is part of the cultural history of English speakers that they have always adopted loanwords from the languages of whatever cultures they have come in contect with. There have been few periods when borrowing became unfashionable, and there has never been a national academy in Britain, the U.S. , or other English-speaking countries to attempt to restrict new loanwords, as there has been in many continental European countries.

Words are often taken from other languages to fill lexical gaps - to provide names for new objects or phenomena. Thus, window was 'borrowed' by English from Old Norse via Danish in around 1200. But borrowed words also often compete with existing words in the borrowing languages as differnt foreign languages come into and out of fashion, as the French language has in England over the centuries. This is why English has both cookery and cuisine, friendly and amiable, help and aid. Some loan words keep their foreign appearance, like the French bon vivant in English, while others are adapted to the orthography and pronounciation of the host language, like battery from Old French batterie.

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Hi,

Another type are translated directly into the host language, creating loan translation or calque. This is how honeymoon became lune de miel in French. Curiously having borrowed weekend at the beginning of the 20th century, French now attempts to avoid the Anglicism rather half-heartedly, by using the loan translation fin de semaine.
But perhaps the most important feature of the borrowing phenomenon for language learners and teachers alike is thet once the word has been borrowed and, where appropriate, adapted ortographically, it becomes a part of the host language and the speakers of that language can do with it what they will. And they do! Some loan words can be trusted and can be a real boost to the language learner's comprehention and vocabulary learning, but others are traps. There is, therefore, an alarming stock of false friends among words which look thoroughly trustworthy to the learner whose mother-tongue those words were borrowed from.
English was once one of the most assiduous borrowers of words and has been borrowing words from French, for example, for more than 900 years. Here are some that spring immediately to mind: femme fatale, faux pas, déja vu, tete-a-tete, au fait, margarine and migraine.
Faux ami is frequently used French loan expression for the loan translation false friend. But French is not the only source of borrowed words in English. From German, for example, English borrowed Schadenfreude, Angst, Flak, Blitz, Rucksack, Kindergarten, and Vandal. And Italian gave pasta, pizza, spaghetti, opera, mafia, pianissimo and ciao. It is to Spanish that English people owe cockroach, though English did take the Spanish word cucaracha and adapt it to a more English pronounciation and spelling. And English borrow from other varieties of their language too. US English gave radar, blizzard, rattlesnake, and stunt(the noun), for example.
These days, however, English, and especially US English varieties of English, has become far more of a lender than a borrower.
When it comes to borrowing words, linguistic receptiveness tends to go hand in hand with cultural receptiveness and this has certainly been the case in the history of the English as word lender. As a lender, English was late starter. There is a very little evidence of the beginning of the 18th century. It was at this time that France, closely followed by italy and the by other European nations, developed an enthusiasm for all things English, and this included words. A huge number of English loan words entered French and, directly or indirectly, via French, the other languages of Europe.

In the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st, globalization and the level of the contact among countries has meant that English words have spread more widely and in greater number than ever before. This is largely due to the cultural and political predominance of the USA, in particular. These days, English words enter the language of countries worldwide through pop and youth culture, technology (particularly, computers and the Internet), the media and advertising, among other channels. Governments all over the world, and notably in South East asia, have complained that there isn't time to translate these English words into the local languages and so a hybrid of English and the local language develops, often referred to as 'Tinglish' (Thai and English) or 'Chinglish' (Chinese and English) for instance. Borrowing can even lead to loan words outnumbering indigenous words, as they do in Korea (which borrows heavily from Chinese and English in particular) by an estiamted ratio of 60% to 40%. In Iceland a board has been set up dedicated to translating words for new phenomena into more Icelandic-based words to prevent this happening.

With English words being so avidly and speedily absorbed into foreign languages either out of necessity or at the whim of fashion, and with borrowing being the free and ungoverned process it has always tended to be, interpretation of meanings are often quite mistaken or quite deliberately disregarded. The important thing, it seems, in very many cases, it is not what the word being borrowed actually means, but quite simply, that it is an English word. It is worth remembering that English once gobbled up French in the same way.

Loans take a number of different forms, though many will fall into more than one category, and they can all lead to the creation of False Friends.

In many cases, the word ...

To be continued.

An added problem with some...