BLAH-BLAH-CLUB English Conversation Club

The English learner of Russian may be daunted by the new alphabet, but has on their side a lot of similar words that exist in the two languages: телефон means 'telephone'; такси means 'taxi'; сестра means 'sister', and since both Russian and English took a large number of their technical words from Greek, диспессия, география, астрономия all mean exactly what one might expect. But the English learner of Russian and the Russian learner of English must still exercise the same caution as any learner of a foreign language, as dangers may be lurking anywhere. Бог means, not 'bog', but God.

The following list of false friends between Russian and English is populated by words which were 'borrowed' into Russian from other European languages, but which can lure the learner into some uncomfortable traps.

The problem with many of these words is that Russian borrowed them from the same source as English did, but Russian kept closer to the original meaning. Thus, chef was borrowed from French into English with the more specific meaning of 'chief cook', while it was borrowed into Russian as шеф with the meaning of 'leader', 'chief', or 'boss', which was, and still is, the original meaning in French. Thus, шеф is a false friend between both English and French and English and Russian, but a 'true friend' between French and Russian. The same is true of фабрика which means 'factory', as it does in the original French. Эвентуальный (eventual), meaning 'possible', and актуальный (actual), meaning 'topical', will be familiar to anyone who has studied Czech, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Danish and many other European languages.

Sometimes, a word entered both English and Russian from a third language with the same meaning intact, but thereafter developed a different meaning in one or both, and so, what looks like a reassuringly familiar word becomes a potential source of confusion or embarrassment. This is what happened to the first word in the list above. The English word angina originally came from Greek agkhon, meaning 'strangling'. This was assimilated into Latin angere, from which we also got anger and anguish. In mid-16th century English angina referred to a medical condition involving suffocating pain, in particular quinsy, a severe throat swelling, usually occurring as a complication of tonsillitis. This meaning is now very rare in English. In the mid-18th century, angina began to be used in English as a shortening for angina pectoris, severe chest pain caused by inadequate blood supply to the heart. This is what it refers to today. Russian, however, has retained the original, 16th-century, meaning of angina — quinsy, or severe tonsillitis. This false friend landed one English journalist in a tight spot in 1996, just before the Russian presidential elections. On being told that Boris Yeltsin was unavailable because he was suffering from ангина (angina), the unfortunate journalist reported that the presidential candidate had a heart condition, when all he had (at that time) was tonsillitis.

Words can be very slippery customers. All the more so when they start to travel around the globe, mixing in with native words and evolving, as they will, and always have. Cognates, words which have come from the same source, however long ago, are perhaps the most slippery of them all. But at least they keep us on our toes.

Source: MED Magazine