Enduring the betrayal of false friends

Is part of learning a new language

My thirteen year old son asked me the other day about whether I had endured the betrayal of false friends. This could have felt like an alarming question, were I not cognizant of its provenance. There is a framed poem that hangs above our family breakfast nook, purportedly by Ralph Waldo Emerson (although some googling revealed it to in fact be the words of one Bessie A. Stanley). This is how it reads:

To laugh often and much;

to win the respect of intelligent people

and the affection of children;

to earn the appreciation of honest critics

and endure the betrayal of false friends;

to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;

…... This is to have succeeded.

Regardless of its authorship, these sentiments strike me to be as sensible a yardstick by which to measure “success,” as any. But my boy’s question had me heading off in another direction - that of treacherous friends. I had endured many of these during my lifetime, but none of them had been human. The false friends I’d had to contend with were all linguistic: words that sound so similar you think they are your amigo, but it turns out that they were falso amigos intent on betrayal.

Of the languages I speak, English and Spanish lay this trap most often, given that their common etymological roots in Latin, mean they are strewn with cognates - words with similar origin and pronunciation that make for guessable meanings.

Por ejemplo when there is a celebración planned, and you have to send out the invitaciones it is better to do it with tranquilidad. But sometimes a problema arises and especialmente if your caracter is more introvertido you might find this dificil to handle.

Now, any English speaker without a word of Spanish will be able to understand this paragraph with reasonable facility, gracias to the cognates.

Tranquilidad: tranquility

Especialmente. Especially

Problema: problem

Introvertido: introvert

Ejemplo: example

Invitaciones: invitations

Dificil: difficult

Etc

But the big problema is that for every cognate there lurks a false friend who leads you into the quicksands of idiomatic idiocy, where you end up saying you are pregnant (embarazada) instead of embarrassed (verguenza), or that your father was an avocado (aguacate) instead of a lawyer (abogado). Equally, you misunderstand others. Once at a party in Madrid, someone I had barely met began to tell me about his constipation. Appalled at this over sharing I made my excuses to find the spouse and recount this indignity, only to discover that “constipado” in Spanish merely refers to nasal congestion: a cold.

I was also relieved to learn that all the No Molestar signs in hotels, did not mean that Spain was a hotbed of sexual assault, but that “molestar” merely carries the meaning of disturb, shed of any connotations of assault.

As time has gone on, my brain code switches between the languages more efficiently, so that I know what people mean rather than what they say. When a friend told me that someone was very sensible, I knew she meant sensitive. And I have learned that when you say you will “discuss” something with your husband the Spanish-speaking listener might interpret that to mean a heated domestic fisticuffs. “Discutir” in español is to argue, rather than to, well, discuss.

But navigating Spanglish is the idiomatic equivalent of a walk in the park, compared to the HIIT workout of dealing with all the false friends within the same language of Chinese.

Picture this:

I am sitting in a Beijing cafe and failing to ask for a sachet of sugar to add to my coffee. The waitress persistently points to photos of assorted soups on the menu. “Wo (I) yao (want) tang (sugar),” I try, once again, in my newly learned Mandarin. “Tang,” she repeats, nodding her head in agreement, while pointing to the soups. We gape at each other like a pair of blow fish. It’s an impasse. Journeying in new languages is full of these.

Chinese is a non-alphabetic idiom, more visual - all dashes, dots, and lines- than the phonic varieties that use ‘abc’s or the like. When a Chinese person cannot understand what someone else is saying, they don’t spell it out, but use their index finger to draw it in the air, the sense impression of the strokes lingering a while in the ether.

The alphabets of the two languages that I grew up speaking, English and Hindi, have 26 and 45 letters respectively. These letters are pure sound and only form meaning when combined into words. In contrast, Chinese logograms are called characters and each one is an amalgamation of meaning and sound. There are more than 100,000 different characters in this scriptural universe, although to be considered reasonably literate you need to know “only” between 3,000-6,000.

The tang-tang tussle the waitress and I are having, has to do with the inordinate number of homonyms, or characters that are represented by the same sound, in Chinese. These characters are spelt in the same way in their standardized alphabetic form, called Pinyin. The Pinyin spelling of “yi,” for instance, is shared by nearly 200 characters, including ones that mea

n, ‘one,’ ‘cloth,’ ‘to lean,’ ‘she,’ ‘ripple,’ ‘a squeal’ and so on. What distinguishes them - albeit only to an extent - is the tone in which they are enunciated.

Tang in what is called the first tone (a high, flat one) is soup, while tang in second tone, (a rising one, as if asking a question) is sugar. If I could have squiggled 糖 in the air like a local, instead of verbalizing it with the wrong tone, no one would have thought I meant soup, 汤.

Xxxx

So how have you dealt with the betrayal of false friends? Any stories to share? Please do, and of course, subscribe because your patronage is both needed and appreciated :-)