Funny false friends

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English stuff and Spanish estufa (?stove?). Think cool stuff → estufa fría (?cool/cold stove?), not really ?cool? if you want to use it to warm your room.

Latin scortum (=prostitute)

Italian scorta (=escort, or supply)


I once rented an Italian film called La Scorta, under the impression it was about something other than what it was!

Spanish: blanco is white, not black
French: blanc is white, not black

english exit, a way out.

spanish éxito, result, success.

I love this one: "kopile" in just about any south Slavic language means bastard (child) while in Romanian it somehow changed meaning to child in general "copil".

English stunt, Esperanto estonto (?future, yet to be?), Spanish es tonto (?[he/it] is dumb, silly, foolish?) and Portuguese és tonto (?[you] are dumb, silly, foolish?).

I love those chains

By the way ?

whoa...! ! true friends = false cognates?

how 'bout this one:

Japanese baba (祖母/ばば) (grandmother) and Russian baba (бабушка, баба; grandmother) and Yiddish Bubbe (Grandmother)

Nice

?True friends? inasmuch as they do mean the same; false cognates, because they don?t share an etymology, despite superficially appearing to. Conversely, many of the false friends we?ve listed in this thread are true cognates, because they have the same etymology, but their meanings have drifted apart over time.

Esperanto fea (?pertaining to fairies?) and Spanish fea (?ugly?, feminine).

Spanish enviar (?to send?) and English envy. The Spanish words for ?envy? are envidia (noun) and envidiar (verb), preserving the Latin intervocalic -d- lost in French envie, whence English envy comes. The trademark NVIDIA looks conspicuously like a play on the Spanish noun.

Speaking of etymologies?,

I wonder why I didn’t remember these before.

Portuguese anho (‘lamb’) and Spanish año (‘year’). They’re pronounced essentially the same, but, as one can easily guess, their consonants have different origins, somewhat reflected in the different spellings: their Latin etymons are agnus and annus, respectively.

Portuguese ano (‘year’) and Spanish ano (‘anus’). Latin intervocalic -nn- became -ñ- in Spanish, but was simply reduced to -n- in Portuguese. Spanish retains Latin intervocalic -n-, while Portuguese generally dropped it. The Portuguese word for ‘anus’, ânus, is a learnèd borrowing from Latin, so it didn’t follow the normal evolution of the language.

What happened to all the other posts?! There were at least 3 pages on this thread last time I checked!

seriously, man alive. while i guess it is to be expected, what happened to this thread?

continuing with false cognates, or true friends:

-Arabic arḍ (earth) and Dutch aarde (earth)

-Hawaiian kahuna (priest) and Hebrew k'huna (כְּהוּנָה) (priesthood)

I still can't see any posts in this thread newer than from July when I look at the thread. Only in the topic overview of the latest posts are the newer ones visible, so it'll be interesting to see how this post will fare.


English: red
Norwegian: redd (scared)

English: Pike (fish)
Norwegian (although rather old-fashioned and pronounced differently): pike (girl)

English: time
Norwegian (although pronounced differently): time (hour)

English: Host
Norwegian (pronounced differently): Host (cough)