False friends in Finnish and English

The concept of false friends

False friends (French “faux amis”) are pairs of words in two languages so that the words are written or pronounced identically or similarly but differ in meaning. False friends cause problems especially when you see or hear a word in a foreign language and you assume that it has the same meaning as a similar word in your native language.

A special case of false friends consists of words that, in addition to being similar in two languages, have the same origin but different meaning, due to differences in changes of semantics. False friends in this sense, sometimes called false cognates, usually appear in closely related languages. For example, there is a large number of such false friends in Finnish and Estonian, such as Finnish vaimo (wife) and Estonian “vaimu” (spirit, ghost) and Finnish huvittava (amusing, funny) and Estonian “huvitav” (interesting). Between English and Finnish, such false friends are mostly caused by changed meanings of international words.

Some examples

In the following table, each row contains

• an English word
• a Finnish word resembling (in spelling or pronunciation or both) the English word
• an explanation of the meaning of the Finnish word in English.

Specialized meaning

There are some word pairs that could be regarded as false friends in the sense that a Finnish word has a much more restricted meaning than its “friend” in English. For example:

In English, “sex” can refer to the two sexes, but in Finnish seksi means sexual activity or sexual at­trac­tive­ness only (and sukupuoli is used for one of the sexes).

In Finnish, sortsit (or shortsit) means short trousers only, whereas short underpants are called alushousut.

The English word “tape” occurs as a loanword in Finnish, written teippi, but it has the very restricted meaning: adhesive tape (whereas a tape in general is nauha).

False friendship may depend on the context

Some words are false friends in some contexts only:

• English “positive” can usually be translated as positiivinen (and in some contexts it must be translated that way), but translating “I’m positive” that way would be an error (it must be translated e.g. as olen varma).
• “invalid” can often be translated as invalidi or synonymously vammainen, but not in a context like “invalid command” (which could be translated as virheellinen komento).
• “liberal” is often liberaali (or synonymously vapaa­mielinen, “free-minded”), but “liberal education” is certainly not liberaali kasvatus (though it might be seen mistranslated that way) but rather klassillinen koulutus
• “moral” as an adjective is normally translated as moraalinen, but “moral of the story” is not tarinan moraali (rather, tarinan opetus).

Some special false friends

Originally, pateettinen means “high-flown”, whereas the English “pathetic” in its modern meaning, as opposite to its old dictionary meaning, is translated e.g. as säälittävä or surkea. But it seems that the impact of English has changed things so that pateettinen now very often means “pathetic”. In the Finnish version of The Lion King on video, Zazu’s words about Simba becoming a pretty pathetic king have been translated as sinusta tulee hyvin pateettinen kuningas. In this context, both interpretations are plausible, and perhaps the translator intentionally created the ambiguity!

A personal note might illustrate some problems with false friends. During my visit to the US in the 1980s, I, being a smoker at that time, was looking for a vending machine to buy some cigarettes. I asked a motel employee whether the motel had a cigarette automaton. This resulted in a rather embarrassing situation. In Finnish, automaatti means a vending machine, or an automatic teller machine, or other “automatic system”, in addition to automata.