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The term was introduced by a French book, Les faux amis: ou, Les trahisons du vocabulaire anglais (False friends, or, the betrayals of English vocabulary), published in 1928. As well as producing completely false friends, the use of loanwords often results in the use of a word in a restricted context , which may then develop new meanings not ...
Generally, words coming from French often retain a higher register than words of Old English origin, and they are considered by some to be more posh, elaborate, sophisticated, or pretentious. However, there are exceptions: weep , groom and stone (from Old English) occupy a slightly higher register than cry , brush and rock (from French).
The term "false cognate" is sometimes misused to refer to false friends, but the two phenomena are distinct. [1] [2] False friends occur when two words in different languages or dialects look similar, but have different meanings. While some false friends are also false cognates, many are genuine cognates (see False friends § Causes). [2]
Also excluded are words that come from French but were introduced into English via another language, e.g. commodore, domineer, filibuster, ketone, loggia, lotto, mariachi, monsignor, oboe, paella, panzer, picayune, ranch, vendue, and veneer. English words of French origin should be distinguished from French words and expressions in English.
This list contains Germanic elements of the English language which have a close corresponding Latinate form. The correspondence is semantic—in most cases these words are not cognates, but in some cases they are doublets, i.e., ultimately derived from the same root, generally Proto-Indo-European, as in cow and beef, both ultimately from PIE *gʷōus.
French liaison and enchainement are essentially the same external sandhi process, where liaison represents the fixed, grammaticalized remnants of the phenomenon before the fall of final consonants, and enchainement is the regular, modern-day continuation of the phenomenon, operating after the fall of former final consonants. [5]
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More remotely, cognate terms from different languages can be borrowed, such as sauce (Old French) and salsa (Spanish), both ultimately from Latin, or tea (Dutch thee) and chai (Hindi), both ultimately from Chinese. This last pair reflects the history of how tea has entered English via different trade routes.