False Friends and Not Having The Words

Nothing unpleasant here, chaps.  I am very happy to say that I have many true friends and no false ones.

What I'm talking about is those words in two different languages which SEEM to mean the same thing, but don't.

*Time-travel note*  That was what I STARTED intending to talk about, but I've gone down several alleys already - some of them blind and some of them intriguing, so, frankly, this could end up being about more or less anything.  You carry on reading, and I'll scroll back down to the bit I've got to so far, which is about Cardinal Richelieu, just so you know, when you get there.

We all know that Britain and America are famously separated by a common language - a phrase attributed to George Bernard Shaw - but then pretty much everything which wasn't attributed to Oscar Wilde around that time was attributed to GBS.  For all we know, it could have been my ol' great grandma who said that, but someone thought it sounded Shavian.  Anyway.  Meanwhile, Oscar Wilde was cleverly actually WRITING DOWN a similar sentiment - "We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language." 

I'm actually, possibly surprisingly, quite a supporter of the way the Americans speak English.  A lot of it is a more perfectly preserved version of the English we spoke back in the day.  Sidewalk is of course a far more logical (and original) word for a pavement - certainly before the advent of tar-penetration macadam - or tarmac, as we call it.  On a side note, I briefly dated a chap in my late teens whose surname was MacAdam, and who swore blind that his grandfather invented Tarmac.  As I did know that it's more proper name is tar-macadam, I accepted this blindly until just now, when I checked, and it was invented by a chap named Edgar Purnell Hooley.  Bloody swizz!  Cheeky bastard.  

Meanwhile cookie, once you know that the Dutch for biscuit is koekje, is far less irritating.  Lots of the words which are different between English and American are actually Dutch derivations.  Cupcakes still piss me off, though.  Whatever happened to fairy cakes?

Anyway, this is not meant to be about English and American, although I've got interested in it, now, so in a couple of years, next time I get around to sitting and having a bit of a blog, it might be.

But while I'm on English and American, I'll just give you two examples of false friends.  Bum.  And Fag.  Thanks.  Glad I got those off my chest.

What I WAS going to talk about was the English and French false friends.

The first time I came across these was when we all got in a fit of giggles when accompanying my mother to the dentist.  I should perhaps clarify at this point that I was about 9 at the time, although I'd still sooner my mum came to the dentist with me than go on my own.  Wimp.  Anyway.  The dentist had rather excellent English, and was therefore merrily chatting away to Mum about her teeth, while poking sharp things in her mouth.  She winced, and he informed her that oh dear oh dear, she has very sensible teeth.  The poor man had no idea why my brother and I were stuffing our hankies in our mouths and snorting inelegantly in the corner, because, in French, les dents sensibles are sensitive teeth.  

I've been on the lookout ever since and I'm delighted to report that there are many examples.

The thing is, you see, that the French just don't have the VOCABULARY that we do.  I have mentioned this so frequently that my children now spout this particular piece of wisdom with a world-weary air - "Sigh - they just don't have the WORDS, do they, Mummy?"

The words for like and love are the same.  For kiss and - pardon my French - fuck.  While in English someone can trick you or play a trick on you, or, heaven forfend cheat you, in French they can only tricher - a verb.  Il m'a tricher.  He cheated on me, he tricked me, he played a trick on me - you decide.  It's all in the context because they don't have the WORDS, do they, Mummy?  As we know, only something like 20% of communication is in the words, the rest is body language, intonation, facial expression etc - which is how you can get in so much damned trouble writing to people.  Hence the meteoric rise of the 'emoticon'.  

It is, of course, ridiculous to try to count the number of words in a language, and it always makes me think of the Samuel Johnson episode of Blackadder II.  However, it is a generally accepted almost-fact that the English language has approximately 250,000 words.  It is equally generally accepted that French has approximately 45,000.  Even those of us who had to spend maths lessons sitting in the corner in pointy hats can work out that this is less than a fifth of the number of words.  Extraordinary, no?

But then, you see, while we spot words and phrases in other languages and joyfully adopt, adapt and make them our own, showing savoir-faire, joie de vivre and a certain je ne sais quoi, the French have the Académie Française, devoted to retaining the purity of the French language.  

This idea has always made me laugh a lot, and finding out that it was started out by that bastard, Cardinal Richelieu (of course, I have only Dumas's word for him being a bastard, but I like Dumas, so I'm sticking with his version of events), suppressed during the revolution (VIVE LA REVOLUTION!) and revived by that dispeptic genius, Napoleon, has only made me laugh harder.  Honestly - who'd have thought that Richelieu would STILL be making the French do as he says!

Anyway, if you're not familiar with the Académie, briefly, it has 40 members, known as les Immortels (the Immortals - I mean REALLY!  The NERVE!) who are granted their posts for life.  Unless they do something really naughty.  The mind boggles.  Maybe using the subjunctive incorrectly, or referring to "le weekend".   

Actually, I just got interested in that, and rather pleasingly the most recent expulsions were for Academy members cohorting with the Nazis during WWII.  I actually feel a tiny degree of warmth towards them for the first time, ever.

Anyway (again - if you don't have to start at least 14 paragraphs in a chat with the word 'anyway', you've probably stuck to the point toooooo much), basically, it's their job to stick the French language down and approve or disprove any cheeky little words that try to sneak into the language from other places.  I can only imagine that this job has become more and more difficult as technology accelerates.  They had a great success with 'ordinateur' when computers first came in and people started off by saying 'le computer', but it's all moving so fast now, and I (possibly unfairly) assume that they are not the most technologically literate of croups of people, so it must be hellish hard to keep up with, m'loves.

Of course, there are two sides to every argument, and while the Academy's pinning down of the French language, which I always envisage as all the words being literally pinned down like butterflies in one of those Victorian cabinets, is the diametric opposite of our liberal "What's that you said?  Ooooh, good word!  We'll have that!" approach to language, it does give French writers a certain amount of fluff space which we don't have.

Hm.  I know what I'm trying to say here, but I'm not sure that fluff space is hacking it.  





Well, actually, let's take aimer and baiser, as they were the examples I gave above. There's room for a lot of double entendres (there's another adoption) with those two alone. When you try to translate from French to English, if it's not a technical document, it can sometimes be quite tricky for exactly this reason. The writer may well have deliberately left a wodge of ambiguity for the reader to play with, but the translator has to go in and PIN DOWN the author's meaning! Aha! That's strange, don't you think? That the limiting of words in a language can actually allow for more interpretations?
So while I think it's fabulous that we have five times as many words for funny as the French do, I RAIL at the English subtitles to French films because I almost always entirely disagree with them.
Cyrano de Bergerac is a CLASSIC example of this, and when I am an old, old lady, confined to bed and with nothing else to do, I am going to sit up and re-translate that film because that idiot Anthony Burgess made a proper bloody fist of it. The film is in verse and for some reason best known to himself, Burgess decided the put all the bloody subtitles in verse, too, thus, more often than not, absolutely KILLING the language. Why he wanted to do this is beyond me. Why someone actually let him do this is further beyond me. And how he managed to sleep at night after he'd put his name to this travesty of a translation is beyond me. While, in French, Gerard Depardieu is buckling his swash, swaggering, declaiming and roaring with wit and poetry, Burgess, down in the subtitles, is mincing around like a complete tit strangling - no, too strong - holding a pillow over the face of the film and slowly killing it. I have to put masking tape over the bottom half of the screen to even watch the film these days. TIT.
Well, I told you I'd gone down a blind alley, and I've given you almost no examples of false friends at all. The Nice Man From Asda has just delivered my groceries, and there's a bag of raw frozen prawns thawing out somewhere amongst it, so I must whoosh back to real life and get on with My Chores. I've got loads more to say about this, but if I don't post it, it will never happen. So publish and be damned, woman.
Please feel free to post your false friends in the comments section below. I would be most grateful if someone would haul this blog back towards something resembling its original title...
Cheers.