El viejo vivía como un recluso.

Sentence Discussions Spanish
#1
English Translation

The old man lived as a recluse.

I reported this one. Recluso is a false cognate meaning “prisoner.”
https://dle.rae.es/recluso

#2

You mean a false friend. These words are actual cognates.

#3

Thanks for the correction! I looked it up and discovered that “false cognate” shouldn’t be used when the words share the same etymological root (which I never doubted this pair did) despite differing in meaning.

But I also saw mention of the fact that the term is commonly (though erroneously) used as if it were synonymous with “false friend,” with some commenters lamenting that their language profs are guilty of that. I know my 1st year Spanish prof was. She used the terms interchangeably, and my view was that “falso amigo” sounded silly & juvenile while “falso cognado” sounded erudite & linguistic, so I’ve always used the latter with my students (I teach the 1st two semesters of college Spanish.)

Although it will pain me to do so, I guess I’d better switch to “falsos amigos” for all of the deceptive pairs that do share the same root. But I’ll have to bone up on those that don’t, as I never focused on the distinction. I thought that éxito /exit might be an example of a real false cognate but just discovered it isn’t. Also just learned that mucho/ much are false cognates even though they’re “friends” semantically (which I will not point out in class, but I guess I’d better stop using it as an example of a cognate.) I’ll have to consult some reliable reference works to correct my deficiency on this; simple web searches bring up too many results that confuse the terms.

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#4

Right. Meanings drift and develop and I wouldn’t normally nitpick about this sort of thing, but if we let it pass, it would mean that words can be ‘false cognates’ and ‘true cognates’ at the same time! which is silly.

‘Much’ and ‘mucho’ is a good example of false cognates. Another one that was very surprising to me is ‘have’ and ‘haber’ – apparently ‘have’ is cognate with ‘caber’ (!).

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#5

Any examples of real false cognates that aren’t alike in meaning? I can’t think of any offhand. Every time I think of a deceptive word pair that seems like it might not share an origin I find out it does.