vrais amis ?

[Roman]

So, you've heard of faux amis, well, how about vrais amis? Since I've been trying to learn French, I've noticed that there are many words that are either the same or similar and sometimes it wasn't so obvious at first since it might typically be translated to a more common synonym. In any case, it might be helpful to associate some words to help to remember what something means. (if there was an appropriate place to put this, it would be interesting to add Spanish to the list and see what words are the same in all three languages).
français | anglais
conseiller | to advise (think consult)
consulter | to consult
facile | easy (not common, but sometimes facile is used in English similarly)
facilité | ease (or easiness, lack of difficulty, (look up and) think facility)
faciliter | facilitate
aise | ease (as it's used in various expressions)
colère | anger (related to cholera. I guess if you have that, you might be kind of edgy anyway - don't know if that really helps)
bombe | bomb | bomba
ajouter | adjunct | adjunto (there's a relation (adjunct & adjunto are more closely related))

[Bigdan]

Vrais amis :





Cette fille est une bombe / This girl is a bomb

[Ben]

Interesting, thanks Roman!

Originally Posted by Roman

if there was an appropriate place to put this, it would be interesting to add Spanish to the list and see what words are the same in all three languages.

That would be cool, and perfect for "apprendre l'anglais" (which isn't strictly about learning English, but rather just a place for us to communicate with our international friends). So anyone?

[edgar93]

français | anglais | Spanish
conseiller | to advise (think consult) | aconsejar
consulter | to consult | consultar
facile | easy (not common, but sometimes facile is used in English similarly) | fácil
facilité | ease (or easiness, lack of difficulty, (look up and) think facility) | facilidad
faciliter | facilitate | facilitar
aise | ease (as it's used in various expressions) |
colère | anger (related to cholera. I guess if you have that, you might be kind of edgy anyway - don't know if that really helps) | coléra

They are similar, though none of them is the same in all 3 languages .

[Roman]

ajouter | adjunct | adjunto (just occurred to me there appears to be a relation, and then there are words like adjuvant (related to adjunct) which pretty much is the same in both languages) (Spanish has adjunto which appears to be pretty much the same as adjunct, but adjuntar (to enclose) seems too far off to match up with ajouter)

by the way, BigDan's method of including Alizée is definitely helpful

[rehochipe]

ajouter | adjunct | adjuntAR

comme en français les mots finis dans "er" sont verbs, sont traduits à l'espagnol comme verb aussi,

lol!

greets!

[Roman]

Originally Posted by rehochipe

ajouter | adjunct | adjuntAR
comme en français les mots finis dans "er" sont verbs, sont traduits à l'espagnol comme verb aussi,
lol!
greets!

Oui mais, "Espagnole a « adjunto » lequel paraît d'être bien comme « adjunct » en anglais, mais « adjuntar » qui signifie « to enclose » ( en anglais ) me paraît trop loin de « ajouter » pour le mettre ici. N'est-ce pas ? « Adjunct » n'est pas un verbe non plus. Ils sont simplement des mots qui se ressemblent de sens et d'ortographe (ou bien de son).

[FanDeAliFee]

Originally Posted by Roman

Since I've been trying to learn French, I've noticed that there are many words that are either the same or similar and sometimes it wasn't so obvious at first since it might typically be translated to a more common synonym.

A lot of English vocabulary comes from French - thank the Norman conquest for this. An interesting computer science paper (curiously published in a leading physics journal) of recent years on text compression developed a metric for measuring the "affinity" of different languages. By this metric, English was slightly closer to French than German, despite its common Germanic origins with German. I think an anaylsis of the words, or perhaps just the nouns, in the US Declaration of Independence (which was published in the preface of a printed dictionary I once owned) traced the language origins of them so: about 10% Latin and the rest split rather equally between French and Anglo-Saxon.

You might also enjoy reading about an old observation on the
etymological dichotomy of animal and meat names in English.

A French friend once observed that learning French vocabulary can be problematic for the Anglophone because some French words which look (almost) identical to English ones today have rather different meanings.

My French has much withered away over the decades, so I am at a loss for a good example. Perhaps "maintenant" will do. It means "now" and is only distantly related to the word "maintenance." I suppose "maintaining" something is the act of trying to keep things as they are "now," so one can understand how the words diverged in meaning over the centuries. For fun, one can also split "maintenant" into the French words "main" and "tenant" and come up with "hand holding," or as we say in English "at hand," which gives us the hint it means "now."

[Deepwaters]

Originally Posted by docdtv

By this metric, English was slightly closer to French than German, despite its common Germanic origins with German.

Makes sense. I did an experiment some months ago. To really get this, you have to be able to read both French and English.

Here is a text of Beowulf, an epic poem in Old English written sometime between the 8th and 11th centuries -- probably somewhere in the 900s.

http://catterall.net/OE/texts/a4.1.html

Here is a text of La Chanson de Roland, an epic poem in Old French written in the 12th century:

http://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/ga.../rol_ch01.html

Roland isn't much later than Beowulf. Yet I can (sort of) read Roland, or at least it's quite recognizable as being French. Beowulf? Almost pure gibberish. You have to be an Old English scholar to read that thing. Old English is a foreign language to modern English speakers.

Here's something that is to modern English very much as Roland is to modern French:

http://www.librarius.com/cantales.htm

(Click on any of the chapter links on the left frame.)

This is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It was written probably about three hundred years after Beowulf. The language is called "Middle English," but although it's archaic, it's easily recognizable as English. More than twice as much time has elapsed since it was written than passed between Beowulf and Chaucer's time. Yet English has changed far less in those 600+ years than it did between the 10th and 14th centuries. It's changed, yes, but it's recognizably the same language, just as modern French and the language of Roland are recognizably the same language, although changed.

The Norman conquest totally transformed the language. So it's not at all surprising how much French vocabulary has become part of modern English.

[Rev]

Originally Posted by Deepwaters

Makes sense. I did an experiment some months ago. To really get this, you have to be able to read both French and English.

Here is a text of Beowulf, an epic poem in Old English written sometime between the 8th and 11th centuries -- probably somewhere in the 900s.

http://catterall.net/OE/texts/a4.1.html

Here is a text of La Chanson de Roland, an epic poem in Old French written in the 12th century:

http://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/ga.../rol_ch01.html

Roland isn't much later than Beowulf. Yet I can (sort of) read Roland, or at least it's quite recognizable as being French. Beowulf? Almost pure gibberish. You have to be an Old English scholar to read that thing. Old English is a foreign language to modern English speakers.

Here's something that is to modern English very much as Roland is to modern French:

http://www.librarius.com/cantales.htm

(Click on any of the chapter links on the left frame.)

This is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It was written probably about three hundred years after Beowulf. The language is called "Middle English," but although it's archaic, it's easily recognizable as English. More than twice as much time has elapsed since it was written than passed between Beowulf and Chaucer's time. Yet English has changed far less in those 600+ years than it did between the 10th and 14th centuries. It's changed, yes, but it's recognizably the same language, just as modern French and the language of Roland are recognizably the same language, although changed.

The Norman conquest totally transformed the language. So it's not at all surprising how much French vocabulary has become part of modern English.

Wow! It's a long time since I have seen Old English. I had forgotten just how unrecognizable it was.