Pedro J. Chamizo Dominguez, Brigitte Nerlich
False friends come about through semantic change. A word can become specialized, so that its meaning becomes reserved for a smaller domain than the original loanword.
The word camel, when used literally is not a false friend; when used metaphorically, it can be a full false friend. The reasons for this are historical and geographic.
The histories of words such as bano and baigne are quite interesting: Turks used to imprison people in public bathhouses.
Euphemisms can replace earlier literal meanings of words, leading to false friends.
"One could argue that all semantic false friends are cases of (figurative) borrowing (say from Latin and Greek onwards)."-p. 1845
Generally, it seems like languages take words (loanwords) and use them for their specific purposes; as the ways these words are used is different from one language to another, false friends arise. It is similar to the evolutionary phenomenon by which separated animal populations evolve into distinct species over time.
French words chef, maitre, madame.
The study of false friends can illuminate the different ways in which speakers of languages "conceptualize reality."
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