true friend

English

Etymology

By analogy with false friend.

Noun

true friend (plural true friends)

1. (linguistics, uncommon) A word in a language that bears a resemblance to a word in another language and has an equivalent meaning.

   Coordinate term: false friend

   • 1995, Peter Newmark, “Paragraphs on Translation”, in The Linguist, volumes 34–35, page 113:

     True friends are such words when they have precisely or approximately the same meanings in one or more other languages. […] I have written many times that true friends are more numerous than false friends, particularly in the scitech vocabulary, where however there is an important minority of key false friends, carefully listed by my dear colleague Jean Maillot (he has died) in his invaluable La Traduction scientifique et technique (Paris 1981).

   • 2001, Christoph Gutknecht, “Translation”, in Mark Aronoff, Janie Rees-Miller, editors, The Handbook of Linguistics, Oxford, Oxon: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, published 2003, →ISBN, page 698:

     Ronnie Ferguson, author of Italian False Friends (1994: ix), rightly emphasizes that “[a]ccurate translation . . . as well as the proper appreciation of advanced Italian texts, hinge on the confident handling of key words”; among other examples he mentions key words such as attuale (present / topical, never actual), and eventuale (not eventual but possible), which – like their German “true friends” (aktuell, and eventuell) – are false friends of the English words resembling them in form.

   • 2002, Ksenija Leban, “Towards a Slovene-English False-Friend Dictionary”, in Henrik Gottlieb, Jens Erik Mogensen, Arne Zettersten, editors, Symposium on Lexicography X: Proceedings of the Tenth International Symposium on Lexicography May 4–6, 2000 at the University of Copenhagen (Lexicographica: Series Maior), Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, →ISBN, pages 187–188:

     When no divergences could be found or when they proved to reflect systematic differences between the two languages, lexical pairs were classified as true friends. […] In the above-mentioned corpus of 895 Slovene lexical items and their English counterparts, there were 84 true friends, 14 orthographical false friends, 184 phonological false friends, 236 morphological false friends, 232 semantic false friends and 115 zero-equivalent false friends.

   • 2008, Pedro J[osé] Chamizo-Domínguez, Semantics and Pragmatics of False Friends, New York, N.Y., Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, →ISBN, page 28:

     Finally, and in order to finish off this first chapter, I would add that sometimes one can find “true friends” in the most unexpected places as well. […] Since the Malayan Peninsula never has been a Spanish colony and, consequently, it is very difficult to explain these amazing “true friends” between Malay language and Spanish, it seems that the noun tinta has been borrowed, for its part, from Philippines where this borrowing can be explained by appealing to the four centuries of Spanish colonisation.

   • 2009, John Stevens, Taschentrainer Englisch: True and False Friends, Ismaning: Hueber Verlag, →ISBN:

     True friends? […] 1. sharp 2. hot/spicy / scharf (Messer, Frost) = sharp; / scharf (Essen) = spicy/hot

   • 2016, Agnieszka Otwinowska, Cognate Vocabulary in Language Acquisition and Use: Attitudes, Awareness, Activation (Second Language Acquisition; 93), Bristol: Multilingual Matters, →ISBN, pages 46–47:

     While the meaning of partial true friends may overlap, absolute false friends are those words in one language whose meaning is entirely different than it would seem from their similarity to words in another language.

2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see true,‎ friend.
   • 2010, Lee Myung-bak, “Foreword”, in Jai Ok Shim, James F. Larson, Frederick F. Carriere, Horace H. Underwood, Fulbright in Korea’s Future: A 60th Anniversary Commemorative History, Seoul, South Korea: Seoul Selection, →ISBN, page vii:

     There is a well-known proverb, "A friend in need is a friend indeed." Americans have always been our true friends. They stretched out warm helping hands to us when we were in direst need. The Fulbright Program, which was initiated in the throes of the Korean War, has been one such helping hand.