False Cognates

En la enseñanza de español como lengua extranjera (E/LE) para estudiantes brasileños proponemos la
contextualización de los heterosemánticos, conocidos como “falsos amigos”. Establecemos un
contrapunto entre la adquisición/aprendizaje gradual de este léxico y la necesidad de sistematizar su
enseñanza con el propósito de evitar ideas erróneas y perjuicios causados por las malas
interpretaciones. Presentamos reflexiones que conllevan la elaboración de alternativas didácticas para
su estudio y enseñanza.
Buscamos alternativas a las listas de palabras, a la vez que aportamos el uso de muestras auténticas de
lengua en titulares de periódicos de circulación en el mundo hispanohablante.
Los mitos de la facilidad y del bilingüismo son obstáculos para la lectura y la interpretación, mientras
que el contexto se vuelve un elemento primordial, aunque no siempre lleve a la (re)solución de los
problemas semánticos causados por la asistematicidad de la lengua (Wandruska:1976).

Cognates are words that are shared by a particular pair of languages. Even though they receive some attention in second-language learning and translation training, the scope of the phenomenon and its sources is not usually taken into account. Cognates are either true or false (the so called " false friends " of the translator). However, the great majority in any pair of languages is constituted by the " partial cognates " , i.e., cognates that share one sense, but differ with respect to others. These are the cognates that offer the greatest challenge to bilinguals, translators and compilers of dictionaries. The main problem is how to assess, code, and make the differences in their meanings accessible in a convenient way to the bilingual learner/user. The most promising approach is to take into account the specificity of access to the bilingual mental lexicon as studied in psycholinguistics. Both false and partial cognates should be incorporated when developing computerized dictionaries, notably prompting dictionaries. Prompting is assumed to alleviate translation difficulties by offering a shortcut to those translation equivalents in the target language that deviate most from the shared meaning components in a partial cognate pair of words.

There are many languages in the world. They have some similar, different and the same characteristics. They can be similar in terms of pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and so on. As one of the widely used language, the English language has also some similarities and sameness with other languages. For example, grammar-wise all of the Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Norwegian and Danish) are very similar to English. English has some pronunciation similarities with Latin, Roman, Greek, French, German, and so on. The English language has some similarities and sameness with other languages in terms of vocabulary as well. This happens because of borrowings or even accidentally.

Different world languages have a lot of contact with each other and have had different influences on one another. Cognates, words which are similar across two or more languages in some aspects, especially with regard to pronunciation, portray an interesting and relevant aspect of foreign/second language translation and research. This study intended to identify a type of cognate words called false cognates in Persian and English, words which have the same form in two languages but represent different meanings, and tried to study and determine the historical relations between English and Persian words. It also aimed to trace their route back from Proto Indo-European languages to the modern languages. To this end, the related literature was gone through and a sufficient corpus of information has been revealed. Afterwards, authentic monolingual dictionaries in both Farsi and English languages were consulted to provide definitions for the cognates and allow for their cross-linguistic comparison. The findings revealed that most of such problematic cognates with different meanings in Farsi and English as found through this study are likely to be confusing and deceptive for Farsi-speaking EFL learners. The findings also pointed to the need for this line of research to receive more scholarly attention. The study of true and false cognates has some implications for contrastive analysts, error analysts, translators, translation theorists, foreign language teachers, curriculum designers, as well as lexicographers and lexicologists.

En esta investigaciòn se propone una nueva metodologìa para describir y analizar el crecimiento léxico. Se da un seguimiento longitudinal a cada palabra y  se muestran tendencias en comportamiento como una tendencia general: El mapa dinàmico
Esta propuesta una propuesta diferente al viejo anàlisis variabilidad vs tiempo. Aquì se tratan tiempo y variabilidad como ejes fundidos.

... It is on the basis of this trilingual lexical (word-form) relationship that I thought that I knew the word and afterwards with a degree of ... Cognates in language, in the mind, and in a prompting dictionary 233 7. Types of cognates with respect to meaning identity/difference Barnickel ...

This paper presents an extension of Baxter & Manaster-Ramer's (2000) approach to the problem of false cognates in the determination of relationships between languages. Their approach uses a Monte Carlo simulation to estimate how many lexical similarities we can expect to be due to chance between two lexical lists from different languages, and consequently how many are too many to be all false cognates. Although very efficient, their model has the shortcoming of being applicable only to simple lexical lists such as the Swadesh list, with one-to-one semantic correspondences between the individual terms. Here I present a new model that can be applied to any kind of word list, and can include comparisons between multiple terms sharing the same semantic field. After a theoretical description, a controlled test and a contra-test, I finally apply the method to a real test case, investigating the probability of relation between Pre-Greek, the non-Indo-European substrate of classical Greek, and Proto-Basque, Proto-Uralic and 'Proto-Altaic' .

In this article we focus on ‘false cognates’, lexical items that have overlapping orthographic/phonological properties but little or no semantic overlap. False-cognate pairs were created from French (second language or L2) and English (first language or L1) items by manipulating the levels of morphological correspondence between them. Our aim was to test whether mismatches in morphological structure affected success on a low-frequency backward lexical translation task. Fifty-eight participants, divided into four groups (A-level; degree level; adult learners; bilinguals) were tested on monomorphemic items (simplex), polymorphemic items (complex), items whose morphological structure in French exceeded that of their English counterpart (mismatch), and control items. Translation success rate followed a uniform pattern: control > mismatch > simplex > complex. With respect to the false-friend effect, participant responses were also uniform: complex > simplex > mismatch. It ...

This article examines the issue of cognates in frequency-based vocabulary size testing. Data from a pilot study for a cognate- controlled English vocabulary size test was used to assess whether a group of Japanese university English learners (n=60) were more successful at responding to cognate items than noncognate ones in three 1000 word frequency bands on a Japanese-English translation task. The results showed a statistically significant difference between scores achieved on cognate and noncognate items at the 2000 and 3000 frequency levels, but not at the 1000 frequency level. The findings suggest that cognate items may be easier for test-takers to respond to than noncognate ones of similar frequency, indicating the importance of ensuring that their respective proportions in tests are representative of those inherent in the frequency bands they have been sampled from. It is also argued that such representativeness may best be achieved via a stratified item sampling approach.

False Cognate/yalancı kökteşler, dil öğretimi ve çeviri süreçlerinin önemli bir sorunudur. Aynı etimolojik kökten gelen, telaffuzu ve şekli benzer ancak anlam alanı farklı olan kelimeler; false friend/yalancı eş değer şeklinde adlandırılırken bu süreçte karşımıza çıkan telaffuzu ve şekli benzer, anlamları farklı ancak farklı etimolojik köklerden gelen kelimelere de false cognate/ yalancı kökteş denilmektedir. Yalancı kökteş kelimeler (false cognate words) ve yalancı eş değer kelimeler (false friend) birbirlerine karıştırılmamalıdır. Farsça-Türkçe birbirlerinden kelime alışverişinde bulunmuştur ve bu diller arasında oldukça fazla ortak kelime kullanmaktadırlar. Bu ortak kelimeler arasında çok sayıda falsce cognate/yalancı kökteş kelime bulunmaktadır. Farsça ve Türkçedeki ortak kelimeler Farsça öğrenme sürecinde ve çeviride kolaylık sağlarken yalancı kökteş kelimeler de hatalara sebep olmaktadır. Hedef dildeki yalancı kökteşlerle karşılaşan öğrenci, öğretim sürecindeki birinci dilden olumsuz aktarım yaparak kelimeyi Türkçedeki anlamıyla kabul etmekte ve hata yapmaktadır. Bu çalışma Farsça öğrenmek isteyen Türkiye Türkçesi konuşurlarının yalancı kökteş kelimeler konusunda farkındalık sahibi olmalarını ve bu karışıklıktan kaynaklanan sorunların daha kolay çözümlenebilmesine katkı sunmayı amaçlamaktadır.

This article explores one aspect of the processing perspective in L2 learning in an EST context: the processing of new content words, in English, of the type 'cognates' and 'false friends', by Spanish speaking engineering students. The paper does not try to offer a comprehensive overview of language acquisition mechanisms, but rather it is intended to review more narrowly how our conceptual systems, governed by intricately linked networks of neural connections in the brain, make language development possible, creating, at the same time, some L2 processing problems. The case of 'cognates and false friends' in specialised contexts is brought here to illustrate some of the processing problems that the L2 learner has to confront, and how mappings in the visual, phonological and semantic (conceptual) brain structures function in second language processing of new vocabulary.

Steps for Reading focuses on useful techniques and reading comprehension strategies.  It presents information on the reading process and compares languages to avoid misunderstanding due to real and false cognates.

Key words:  reading comprehension, cognates, Wernicke's Area, Broca's Area, visual cortex.