As someone who speaks two and half languages, I am well aware of false cognates.
Wiktionary.com describes a false cognate this way: A false friend, a word that appears to have the same meaning as a given word, but that does not (without regard to whether or not the two terms are cognate).
Once upon a time, a long time ago (I'm guessing in the early 1950s), my grandmother learned about false cognates in a way that could have led to a tragic ending.
My grandmother was a French-speaking Belgian, and as most ladies in her neighborhood did, she had a maid who cleaned and cooked for the household. My grandmother's maid was from Spain and spoke mostly Spanish.
(Hey, don't get all snippy on me about maids and equal labor and all that... I have nothing to do with maids and everything else... different time, different country... I'm just telling the story.)
My grandmother, like me in my previous post, fancied her Spanish much better than it probably actually was. She often told me that in order to figure out a Spanish word, you could just take a French word and slap an "o" to the end or just pronounce it with a Spanish accent and be done with it. Actually, I'd say this worked out pretty well about 97.5% of the time.
During this time period, I think most ladies socialized by way of coffee klatsches, and my grandma was no exception. Prior to having five children, she was a social worker who helped hide Jewish people in attics in Belgium during World War II, which is pretty amazing at the age of 23. At any rate, big change from doing that to being a stay-at-home mom of four girls and a boy.
On one particular day, my grandmother decided that she wanted a coffee cake of some sort for her lady friends coming over and that she would ask the maid to bake one.
Now, if you are a French speaker of any sort, you will already know that the French word for "cake" is "gateau."
If you speak any Spanish, you are probably thinking at this point that no good can come of what comes next.
My grandmother did not know the word for "cake" in Spanish, so she decided to fall back on her old technique for figuring out an unknown Spanish word.
If you speak any Spanish, you probably know, at this point, that no good can come of this.
(On an unrelated side note, my grandmother had two pet cats.)
According to my grandmother, who would fall over, laughing hysterically every time she told this story, the scenario unfolded something like this (imagine this whole conversation in Spanish):
Grandma: Serena, por favor, I have friends coming over today.
Maid: Sí, señora. What do you want me to make?
Grandma: I would like you to bake a gato for me and my friends.
Serena (looking around the room uncomfortably): Gato, señora?
Grandmother (insistently): Sí, Serena. A gato. Please bake a gato for me and my friends.
Serena (starting to look concerned): Señora, no! Not a gato!
Grandmother (pantomiming opening the oven and firmly shoving a hapless gato in there): Sí! Sí! Un gato. In the oven. Bake the gato so my friends and I can eat it this afternoon.
Serena (horrified and on the verge of tears at my grandmother's insistence): No! I cannot bake the gato! That's not ok!
(Cat wanders into the kitchen, looking coy and unconcerned about being baked in an oven.)
Serena (pointing to the cat): This gato, Señora? No, I can't bake this gato! Or the other one! I will not bake a gato!
Grandmother (lightbulb coming on over her head): Oh my God! No! No, not a gato! Not a cat! No gato!!!
I'm unsure as to how this scenario ended because my grandmother was always besides herself in gales of laughter by the time she got to this point in the story. She would usually be cackling wickedly, tears running down her face, and completely unable to finish her sentences.
Surely, this kind of thing happens to other people? What false cognate gaffes have you made?
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