[gobolinux-users] offtopic: language and "false friends" - Re: wlan settings with kernel

[Hisham Muhammad]

On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 5:23 PM, SoMa Sk8 <soma-sk8 at freemail.hu> wrote:
>  I probed kernel compile, but my problem was screencrash also than someone.

Hi, this is offtopic but a language detail caught my eye so I did a
quick search and my suspicion was confirmed:

I noticed that both you and Viola used "probe" meaning "try out", so I
suspected that it must be a case of what's called in linguistics
"false friends" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend )

The online dictionary says that
both "kipróbál" and "megpróbál" means "to try"
and that "megvizsgál" can mean either "to try" or "to probe"

However, "to try" and "to probe" are different things in English. In
English, "to probe" is more or less exclusively used to mean
"szondáz". So it's not correct to say "I probed to compile the kernel"
(or at least it's very weird!).

False friends in languages are traps that are very easy to fall into.
Every Portuguese speaker has gotten "pretend" and "intend" mixed up at
some point (because the Portuguese word "pretender" actually means "to
intend"!)... and to say "I pretend to compile the kernel" sounds
really weird to English speakers :)

So, most of the time you want to use "probe", you should actually use
"try". Unless of course, you're talking about a space probe (űrszonda)
:-)

Hope that helps!

-- Hisham