Frienemy vs Enemigo
Welcome to another installment of the Outsider Linguistics series, where I propose new and unfounded causation models for societal paradigms via casually perceived linguistic quirks. This installment looks at relationships and word appendages between friends and enemies, and attempts to propose a model that connects the way we speak to the way we see the world.
Plausibly originating in the arts, the word frienemy attempts to perform a balancing act between the boolean concepts of friend and enemy, most commonly indicating that the term ‘enemy’ is the root concept, thinly veiled by the suffixation of the nearly complete “frien”. A frienemy is someone who appears to be, or starts out being, your friend, but reveals himself to be your enemy, although possibly without disrupting the friendship. Regardless of the etymology, our common English understanding of friend and enemy posits them as polar opposites, concepts that have no relationship to each other besides their opposition. Friends and enemies don’t come from the same places, don’t share a common root, don’t have the ability to change sides, cannot transform or migrate. They are purely distinct and repel each other. This is where the power of the term frienemy comes from, it’s the dangerous and tenuous balance between these naturally opposed forces.
Many years ago, I found it amusing and quaint that in Spanish, the words for friend and enemy were closely related, amigo and enemigo. Amusing because the linguistic pattern matching part of my brian is ticklish, and quaint because it was clear to me at the time that a less distinct cut between the expression of these concepts represented less experience in, or a lack of honest evaluation of, the harsh realities of the world (i was in high school ok?). If spanish speakers see their enemies as simply ‘un-friends’ does this mean there could be potential migration back and forth between these two states? Are these relationship states simply different sides of the same coin, endpoints on a slider, or are they more akin to oil and water, fundamentally different? Could these specific questions be related to the nature of all conceptual opposites?
Several years later, as part of an art based propaganda war between rival meme gangs (CitAC and N.I.N.E.), one widely distributed sticker dared it’s readers to “stop pretending you have no enemies”. It could have also read, “stop pretending opposites don’t exist.”
Frienemy is still a rarely printed word, but it recently showed up in a headline of an article about the future relationship between the governments and economies of China and the United States. I wanted to know if more languages follow the English model or the Spanish model, and if anything could be learned from this about our cultural connections to the ideas of opposition.
A very quick survey of some languages available through google’s translation tool (limited to roman based characters) reveals the following pairings.
friend as the root:
ami ou ennemi (french)
amigo o enemigo (spanish)
mik apo armik (albanian)
amic o enemic (catalan)
prijatelj ili neprijatelj (croatian)
přítel nebo nepřítel (czech)
priateľ alebo nepriateľ (slovak)
vinur eða óvinur (icelandic)
amico o nemico (italian)
enemy as the root:
related but not using modification through appendage:
vriend of vyand (afrikaans)
vriend of vijand (dutch)
Freund oder Feind (german)
zanmi oswa lènmi (haitian creole)
seemingly not related:
cara nó namhaid (irish)
teman atau musuh (malay)
rafiki au adui (swahili)
arkadaş ya da düşman (turkish)
ffrind neu gelyn (welsh)
ħabib jew ghadu (maltese)
friend or enemy (english)
Has a mashed up term like frienemy also evolved in Irish, Malay, Swahili, Turkish, Welsh and Maltese? Is the concept of a backstabbing friend, or a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as culturally powerful in these places as it is in our own?
The larger group, that does use friend as the common root, would presumably have a tough time inventing words that sit between their already intimate terms. Is there no need for further disambiguation between ami and ennemi? Are these cultures more tolerant of differences in general? less prone to violence? more cooperative? How do their political structures relate to their languages? Do these languages have more examples of appending suffixes to denote opposites? Is there a difference in how a language sorts verbal polarity internally? Does it matter if we are talking about polarity in nature or culture? between objects or people?
English makes at least one notable use of the suffixed polarity model with male and female. If we had completely unrelated representations of these concepts, would we understand each other more or less fluently? Would we feel more or less antagonism? Would we have more of less equality in the work place?
Can the structural relationships of our words predispose our cultural emotions and priorities?
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