Slavonic false friends
I often marvel at how close the Slavonic languages remain to each other in spite of 1500 years of individual development. The slow pace of phonetic change means that their lexicons are all very similar indeed. Yet, one shouldn’t assume too much that a word in one language necessarily still has the same meaning as in another, for there are a surprising amount of faux amis. This I discovered by finding (via UGJ) Daniel Bunči’s site “False Friends of the Slavist”. Some differences are minor; the compound листопад lit. “leaf-fall”, may mean “October” in Croatian and “November” in Ukrainian, but it is still the name for some month or another. Yet, others can be large enough to confuse the speaker of one language reading a text in another without much training in it, like живот meaning “life” in Bulgarian and “belly, body” in Russian, and плът, historically meaning “flesh” and retaining that meaning in Russian and Bulgarian, now means “fence” in many South Slavonic languages.
December 9th, 2005 at 16:45
Are you sure that плът is the cognate of fence?
In Polish, płot is fence and płeć is sex (male or female), the cognate of which in Czech means skin.
Skin and sex are obviously semantically related but I’m not sure how of the mechanics of a semantic shift from skin to fence. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were two separate roots and one disappeared in Bulgarian and the other disappeared in other South Slavic.
I have a think book (written in Polish) and the vast amount of false friends between Polish and Czech, many illustrated with anecdotes. Some of them are downright perverse, like bezcenny (has an accent in Czech) which means ‘priceless’ in Polish and ‘worthless’ in Czech.
December 16th, 2005 at 06:12
I suspect плът as “fence” comes from a different root. In Ukrainian, at least, the cognate is плетiнь, from the verb плести, because these were basketwork fences made out of twigs woven together.