False cognates

One of the most frustrating parts of learning a romance language is that often words that look like an English equivalent don't mean the same thing. We call these "false cognates," or in French, faux amis (false friends). If that terminology makes you think of backstabbing frenemies, just know that that perception is about as accurate as it gets.

The land of faux amis is a treacherous one, littered with pitfalls and stumbling blocks leading to unintentional innuendos or horrific accidental personal insults. Example: If you're trying to say that you're excited about something, never ever use the Frenchexcité-- that word's connotation is entirely different, making it rather improper for use in polite company. (Good news: there are alternatives. Use ravie or enthousiasteif you absolutely must.)

Suffice it to say that the French language is quite literally full of faux amis. Anglophones practically need a road map to avoid them all.

This poses a significant problem, because there is no systematic way to tell whether or not words are real cognates. For the most part, you just have to make your best guess and risk being laughed out of the conversation. Faux amis often seem utterly arbitrary, as if the people who incorporated French words into English threw all the new vocabulary into a hat and picked a few at random, declaring, "These words will have completely new connotations in the English-speaking world! Students, despair!" while cackling madly.

So, yes, false cognates are incredibly confusing to the Romance-language learner. But what I didn't realize until very recently is that false cognates don't just exist between the romance languages and English -- they exist between romance languages as well! And I thought it couldn't possibly get more difficult.

The week before last, we had a week off from school for February break (don't ask me why -- I'm as in the dark as you are). Like many of my peers, I took the opportunity to travel a bit and visit friends studying abroad elsewhere in Europe. My first stop was in Madrid, which, though sunny and beautiful, had one enormous drawback: I speak approximately three words of Spanish. But I figured I would be all right -- Spanish is a romance language, just like French, so I didn't think it would be too hard to decipher menu items and food labels.

I was wrong. Faux amis struck again.

My first morning in Madrid, I went to breakfast at a small restaurant near my hostel which hosted a reasonably priced (if not terribly extensive) breakfast menu. I sat down, ordered a café con leche, and surveyed my options. One menu item simply said tarta.

"Perfect," I thought, "I love tarts!" The French word for fruit tart being tarte, I assumed this was simply the Spanish spelling of the same item. In halting Spanish, I asked the waiter what type of tarta was being served that morning.

"Fruta," he replied, so I ordered it and set to waiting.

A few minutes later, the waiter returned -- with a slice of birthday cake on a plate, complete with frosting and chocolate shavings on top. To his credit, there were indeed strawberries inside, but imagine my surprise at finding that tarta does not translate to tarte and thus to tart, but to gâteau and thus to cake! My breakfast, which I expected to be a pastry crust filled with fresh fruit from sunny Spain, was instead two layers of chocolate cake stuffed and topped with icing and the occasional strawberry. I had been tricked by faux amis once again!

I ate the tarta and hurried back to my hostel, where I immediately downloaded a Spanish dictionary app to my iPhone. I haven't had cake for breakfast since.