Are there more false friends in English with Romance languages or with Germanic languages

The search did not return a direct comparison or conclusive data explicitly stating whether there are more false friends in English with Romance languages or with Germanic languages. However, the information available suggests there is a significant body of research identifying false friends both between English and Romance languages and between English and Germanic languages, each presenting notable challenges due to semantic divergence, lexical ambiguities, and historical borrowing.

To answer the question comprehensively:

• English and Romance languages (which include French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, etc.) share many cognates and loanwords but also have numerous false friends. This is because English has borrowed extensively from Latin and Romance languages, often leading to words that look similar but differ in meaning.
• English and Germanic languages (like German, Dutch, Swedish, etc.) share a closer linguistic ancestry, but false friends arise due to semantic shifts and false cognates despite this relatedness.

Since no direct quantitative count or clear comparison was found in available sources, a general conclusion from linguistic studies is that English likely has a high number of false friends with both Romance and Germanic languages, possibly more numerous or prominent with Romance languages due to extensive borrowing and semantic shifts. Still, false friends are prevalent and significant in both cases.

If desired, a more specific and detailed analysis might require consulting linguistic databases or studies focused on false friend inventories across these language groups.

Let me know if a deeper dive into specific language pairs is required.

References

• Tracking Semantic Change in Cognate Sets for English and Romance Languages

• FALSE FRIENDS BETWEEN ENGLISH AND ITALIAN Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the B . A . in English Language and Literature and Italian Language and Literature at the University of Rijeka

• Automatically Building a Multilingual Lexicon of False Friends With No Supervision

• The Influence of English on Italian Examined Through Linguisticborrowing

• A Computational Approach to Measuring the Semantic Divergence of Cognates

• False friends in the romanian and english languages a comparative survey

• “The Translator’s False Friends” in the Financial and Economic Lexicon (Based on the Material of English and Russian Languages).

• A Linguistic Investigation Into False Friends in Arabic and English: The Students of Al-Balqa Applied University as a Model

• False Perceptions in Remote Negotiations Influenced by False Friends. A Negotiating Experiment Using Common European-English False Friends

• FALSE FRIENDS OF TRANSLATORS. UNDERSTANDING ENGLISH-GERMAN TRANSLATIONS

• Towards a typological classification of linguistic borrowing (illustrated with anglicisms in Romance languages)

• False-Friend Detection and Entity Matching via Unsupervised Transliteration

• Linguistic Harbingers of Betrayal: A Case Study on an Online Strategy Game

• Review of Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2011. Selected Papers from ‘Going Romance’ Utrecht 2011

• Doing Romance Linguistics: A Multilingual Acquisition Perspective

• Love as a linguacultural space (on the basis of paroemias in the English, Welsh, Gaelic and Scots languages)

• Popular Psychology Through a Scientific Lens: Evaluating Love Languages From a Relationship Science Perspective

• What Words Do We Use to Lie?: Word Choice in Deceptive Messages

• Challenge Dataset of Cognates and False Friend Pairs from Indian Languages