Tuesday, January 8, 2013

5 Difference between cognates and false friends

cartoon difference cognate false friend
Click image to enlarge

5 comments:

  1. The pun relies on the fact that two words are perfect cognates if both have the same etymological origin and carry the same meaning (e.g.: "perfect" and "perfecto"), whereas one word is a false friend from another if they share the same origin but have different meanings, like "constipated" and "constipado".

    Now the problem is that when someone explains a joke you don't get, you can hardly find it funny :)

    BTW, great blog Alejandro!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. False friends, as you correctly point out Alejandro, are translators' friends. I love Mox's happy face while sitting under the tree; he really does get more lovable every day!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Mox is funny as always. I just went through some of the posts. All are pretty cool. Thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Nice to see that Lena is picking up the linguistic jargon!

    ReplyDelete

Dear Spammers, your comments will be deleted and marked as spam.
Dear colleagues, I will not be able to reply to your questions. It was too much time consuming.