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usage-of-false-friends-rule.md

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Usage of the false friends rule

A false friend is a pair of words in different languages that look or sound similar, but differ significantly in meaning.

This section is outdated: The false-friends.xml is not used anymore to decide whether a word is a false friend, but only to generate the error message. See e.g. confusion_sets_l2_de.txt instead.

Take an example:

    <rulegroup id="ABNEGATION">
        <rule>
          <pattern lang="en">
            <token>abnegation</token>
          </pattern>
          <translation lang="pl">poświęcenie</translation>
        </rule>
        <rule>
          <pattern lang="pl">
            <token inflected="yes">abnegacja</token>
          </pattern>
          <translation lang="en">slovenliness</translation>
          <translation lang="en">untidiness</translation>
        </rule>
      </rulegroup>

This rule specifies that whenever you have "abnegation" in an English text and "mother tongue" option set to Polish, a warning will appear that "abnegation" means "poświęcenie" in Polish.

If you, however, are dealing with a Polish text checked with the option "mother tongue" set to English, you will see a warning for every instance of Polish word "abnegacja"; it will tell you that actually in Polish, it means the same as English "slovenliness" or "untidiness".