Mistakable French: Faux Amis and Key Words

Linguistics: Bloomsbury Academic Collections

by Philip Thody, Howard Evans

This book is a dictionary and guide to 1,000 words which look alike in French and English but are faux amis -- false friends indeed. Thus the French word colon means a colonial settler, patron can be a pattern (as for a dress) or an employer, while defiance means distrust, une bombe can mean art insect spray or also an elaborate dessert! And impotent is not necessarily sexually impotent, which in French is impuissant, but seriously crippled. The individual entries also provide the wide social and cultural context within which the words are used in French. This book is very instructive as well as great fun.

Genres: Language, France

228 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book. I read it (slowly and non-exclusively) from cover to cover, and I learned a lot about faux amis and also a lot about French institutional traditions (which explained a lot about EU institutions too, since they seem to be modelled more or less wholesale on their French counterparts).

While a lot of what they say is, as far as I know (which varies), still valid, it was also quite interesting to see that there has been a lot of slippage in both directions in the 35 years since this was published, such that quite a few items listed as faux amis no longer are - meanings have crossed languages both ways. Typically, I failed to note down any examples of this - sorry! It is likely to apply especially to institutional and business language, two of the ten themes covered here. Rest assured, there are more 'fun' themes too: food, travel, sex, clothes etc., for all you fun fiends out there.

Although there is some humour in the entries - quite a bit in fact - it isn't swamped in gratuitous facetiousness in the current fashion, so that's a welcome aspect of its datedness. It's never heavier or drier than it needs to be to convey the information it has to offer, but jokiness is never at the expense of utility either.

It also contains a concise but useful-looking reading list.

Recommended to anyone with an interest in the subject, be it amateur, professional or both.

[Yong Huang · Rating 5 out of 5]

For historical reasons, there are tens of very notable and hundreds of notable false friends between English and French. This is an interesting topic that many people like to talk about. (French "formidable" means "fantastic", and "librairie" means "bookstore", for instance.) But unlike other sources about false friends, late Drs. P. Thody and H. Evans clearly had many years of first-hand experience with the French language and were able to give us a much fuller picture about each pair of these false friends. They draw sources from intellectual luminaries such as Sartre, prominent news medias such as Figaro, or legal and historical documents, and explain the nuanced meanings of the French words in their context, in contrast to their English counterparts. Since I'm personally writing a book about French vocabulary, Drs. Thody and Evan's book proves to be a valuable reference.

Occasionally I find entries in the book worthy of further discussion. For example, "sujet - the student, not the matters studied". Not sure if some of these comments were only valid at some point in the past. But overall, the distinctions made by the authors are unquestionable and interesting to read.