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Department of English and American Studies Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Lenka Tycová Towards a New False Friends Dictionary Bachelor‟s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek 2012 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………… Author‟s signature Acknowledgement: I would like to thank my supervisor Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek for his patience, support, valuable advice and kind guidance. Table of Contents 1.0 Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 6 1.1 Motivation ........................................................................................................................ 6 1.2 Objective ........................................................................................................................... 7 2.0 Defining the Concept of “False Friends” ............................................................................. 8 2.1 Putting it Right: “False Friend” or “False Cognate”? ..................................................... 10 3.0 Classification of False Friends: Categorizing the Uncategorizable? ................................. 13 4.0 Approaches to the Treatment of False Friends ................................................................... 23 5.0 Towards a New Czech-English-English-Czech False Friends Dictionary ......................... 28 5.1 Scope .............................................................................................................................. 28 5.1.1 The Criterion of Formal Similarity .......................................................................... 29 5.1.2 The Criterion of “Falsity” ........................................................................................ 33 5.1.3 The Criterion of Frequency ...................................................................................... 35 5.1.4 The Criterion of Frequency of Error ........................................................................ 38 5.2 Form: Printed and Computerized False Friends Dictionaries ........................................ 40 5.3 Layout ............................................................................................................................. 42 5.4 Entry: Theoretical Guidelines for False Friends Dictionary Entry Compilation ............ 47 5.4.1 Model False Friends Dictionary Entry ..................................................................... 50 6.0 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 52 Works Cited .............................................................................................................................. 54 Résumé (English) ..................................................................................................................... 59 Resumé (Czech) ....................................................................................................................... 60 List of Abbreviations FF False Friends L1 First Language L2 Second Language SL Source Language TL Target Language 1.0 Introduction 1.1 Motivation The phenomenon of “false friends” is more or less vaguely known to most language learners at all levels of proficiency. These tricky words seem to form an inseparable part of second language acquisition; they are a pitfall which occasionally traps even those highly proficient in their second language, including translators; hence false friends need to be dealt with within both the fields of language teaching and translation studies. Yet it is too often the case that little attention is drawn to them, particularly if the meaning divergences are relatively subtle. If the learner does receive some warning instruction, it would most likely be based on, or by means of reference to, a false friends dictionary, which is expected to furnish the learner with all the necessary information. Native Czech learners of the English language have now for more than two decades turned for advice regarding false friends to a dictionary authored by Josef Hladký and entitled Zrádná slova v angličtině (1990). The slight book was published in 1990, before the age of rapid development in the computer science and corpus linguistics, and thus owes its virtues to nothing more than the single-handed scholarly effort of its author. As such, it remains a remarkable collection of false friends pairs; however, new developments in the above areas (among others) have brought about the perception of its shortcomings. Yet other unfavourable points may be raised by a learner, such as myself, when they chance upon some “false friend”, either in Czech or English, subsequently failing to find it in Hladký‟s book. My motivation for writing this work was a combination of the above points; indeed all of them, for it would have been a pity for this extensive collection of false friends which has apparently served its purpose for a number of years to occupy a place on the shelf unopened, owing largely to the “all-computerized” mood of recent years. In addition, it was the marginal attention that the phenomenon of false friends sometimes receives, and the results thereof, that 6 prompted me to write this thesis. As a learner of English, now a student of the English language and literature, I have often witnessed the wrong use, on account of formal similarity, of a word by my fellow students (and I am not so self-confident as to consider myself an exception in this respect). Thus, I argue that more attention should be paid by language teachers to formally similar word-pairs, and that an up-dated and user-friendly false friends dictionary would aid this aim. 1.2 Objective The primary objective of this thesis is to provide comprehensive theoretical guidelines concerning false friends dictionary content and compilation, for this thesis is chiefly designed as a preparatory study for the compilation of a revised and computerized version of Hladký‟s work (1990). The revision and computerization of Zrádná slova v angličtině is a task that the Department of English and American Studies of Masaryk University in Brno has set itself. The task of a dictionary compilation is rarely undertaken or successfully accomplished by a single person; thus, it was often thought useful, or even necessary, to present several possible ways (or views) of approaching a particular aspect of a false friends dictionary compilation, rather than advocating merely one. Indeed, in fulfilling the above stated objective there was an incessant need to account for and balance differing opinions, whether these concerned the very term “false friends”, categorization of false friends or the content of the “ideal” false friend dictionary, which diversity is partially caused by the fact that “false friendship” is a language-specific phenomenon, always peculiar to the two languages involved. 7 2.0 Defining the Concept of “False Friends” The topic of false friends is as old as languages themselves. Yet it was not until 1928 that the term “faux amis (du traducteur)”, which is generally understood1 to be the French equivalent of the now commonly used “false friends”, was coined by Maxime Koessler and Jules Derocquigny in their work entitled “Les Faux Amis2” (Chamizo-Domínguez, 2008, p. 1). The concept arose from the idea that a particular lexical item in the learner/translator‟s L2 (or a given TL) appears to be in a “friendly” relation to (i.e. a correct translation equivalent of) a particular item in the learner/translator‟s L1, helping them to communicate in the foreign language. In actuality, however, the L2 item proves to have a different meaning(s) from those predicted on the basis of formal similarity to the L1 item, thus revealing to be only deceptively “friendly”. Most language learners will have heard at some point or another, quite in accordance with the above, that false friends are those pairs of words in two different languages which look similar but their respective meanings differ. The purpose of this thesis, however, requires a more elaborate definition. The term [false friends] ... refers to the specific phenomenon of linguistic interference consisting of two given words in two or more given natural languages [that] are graphically and/or phonetically the same or very alike; yet, their meanings may be totally or partially different. (Chamizo-Domínguez, 2008, p. 1) Chamizo-Domínguez provides a reasonably accurate definition which manages to embrace all the essential aspects of “false friends”. Even though in a broad sense, the concept may be used to describe multi-word units and even whole grammatical constructions, as suggested by Al-Wahy (as cited by Nihal Yetkin, 2011, 209), this is not very common. More 1 Chamizo-Domínguez (2008) explains that it is actually not a very good translation. 2 Les faux amis, ou, Les trahisons du vocabulaire anglais (conseils aux traducteurs) 8 importantly, the definition includes partial difference in meaning which tends to be, for the sake of brevity, neglected by some more concise definitions. Holmes & Guerra Ramos, to name one example, are contented with stating that false friends are “[words in two different languages that are] orthographically recognizable, but totally different in meaning” (1993, p. 88). It is, naturally, the degree of difference in meaning, or the degree of mutual sense overlap,
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