„FAŁSZYWI PRZYJACIELE TŁUMACZA”: RZECZ O KILKU ZAPOŻYCZENIACH Z FRANCUSZCZYZNY
“TRANSLATOR’S FALSE FRIENDS”: THE CASE OF SOME LOANWORDS FROM FRENCH LANGUAGE

Summary/Abstract: Thanks to the arrangements of the 19th century historical linguistics, the consanguinity of the Romance and Slavic languages is nowadays unquestionable, although one can acknowledge that the French and Polish languages remain rather far cousins. It could be a long dispute when grammatical differences are considered – from phonologic, through morphologic, to syntactic. Due to its complicated grammar, French vocabulary seems to a Polish person much more intelligible, which results from specific (however far from being identical) connection of both languages to Latin, as well as from French and Polish historical contacts. Especially those, for centuries, gave an opportunity for many loanwords from French to appear in the Polish language. Due to the fact of permanent evolution of languages, the fate of a loanword is never predestinated: from the semantic perspective it may remain a faithful equivalent of the word from which it originates or it may change its meaning, sometimes even in a radical way. In my article, concerning the phenomenon of faux amis, that is loanwords, which meanings have strongly changed, I discern the route and the way of assimilation of some of these words in the Polish language, showing that in such a delicate matter as language borrowings it is needed to study each case, to some extent individually.

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