False friends: The case of Tshivenḓa and Xitsonga

Abstract

The challenges that are posed to interpreters by false friends in European languages, such as English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, have been reported on extensively. Although the same challenges may be experienced in African languages, no such report is available for Tshivenḓa and Xitsonga. False friends may cause much confusion and create errors for interpreters. For example, although they share a similar form, the Tshivenḓa word ṱhangu ‘divine bones’ and the Xitsonga word tintanghu ‘shoes’ have different meanings. This study therefore analysed the challenges to Tshivenḓa and Xitsonga interpreters that may be brought about by false friends and proposes possible solutions to dealing with such challenges. The study was conducted following the theoretical assumptions expressed by O’Neill and Casanovas (1997) on the classification of false friends and the set theory of Sabino (2016). Set theory was used to understand the relationship between sets; in this case, Tshivenḓa words that look similar to Xitsonga words. The data for the study was collected from an existing corpora. The result was that some words that looked similar in both languages had totally different meanings or shared partial meaning.