Recently during one of my French lessons, we were reading a text about the prominent crime writer, Agatha Christie. One of the vocabulary items we came across was le mobile. Now when you embark upon studying a language at, say, university, you get to know about its roots. French, as we may know, is a Romance or Latin language – which started to evolve from Vulgar Latin over a thousand years ago. Le mobile has several meanings in use in modern French today, and in the above context means ‘the motive’, a fair bit removed from the original Latin mobilis.
So familiarising yourself with the context of a piece of writing is crucially important, if you are to gain any sense of its meaning. Ever since the Norman Conquest, many French words have been introduced into the English language. Over time, the meanings of these words have evolved, so much so that we now term them as ‘false friends’.
What then are false friends? Here are some interesting examples:
French English
bras - arm
blessé - injured
pain - bread
introduire - to insert
librairie - bookshop
coin - corner
False friends prevent you from successfully guessing the meaning of an unfamiliar word, and when used in conversation, may cause laughter on the part of your fellow interlocutor! So never let yourself be deceived by a false friend, there are plenty of them around.