False cognates
I want to show some interesting facts about English words. There are three of them I will show. Ones some misunderstood people usually do when there are words in English and similar in their languages but with different meanings, the other it’s when the word in English has multiple meaning, this is common to all languages this occurrence of words with multiple meanings or grammatical function, and finally some expressions, interesting ones and similar to the Portuguese ones.
First of all let’s understand the difference between false cognate and false friend.
False cognate x False friend
Usually there is a misuse of the label “false cognate” to describe a pair of words in different languages that have a similar form, but different meanings. For example, many people might call the English word “parents” (pais) and the Portuguese word “parentes” (relatives) a false cognate. However, this is wrong.
The main difference between false cognate and false friend it’s about the root of the word.
Cognate -> Words share the same root.
Ex. Name (englsh) x Nome (Portuguese) = both originate from the Indo-European word ‘’nomen’’.
Don’t necessarily have to share the same meaning.
False cognate -> Similar meaning or form to another, but the root is different.
Ex. Have (englsh) x haver (Portuguese) = they don’t share the same root. “To have” comes from the Indo-European word “kap”, while the origin of “haver” is unknown.
More examples:
False friend -> A word that looks or sounds similar to a word but has different meaning.
That’s what English and Portuguese have a lot of number.
Some examples:
Let’s exercise in the text below several false cognates among other false cognates not:
In the morning I attended a meeting between management and union representatives. We were anticipating a difficult bargaining but it was actually easy. The discussion was very comprehensive, covering topics like working hours, days off, retirement age, etc. Both sides