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English vanilla comes from Spanish vainilla, which is certainly the Spanish name of the plant, and morphologically a diminutive of vaina (‘pod’ or ‘scabbard, sheath’), which, by the way, evolved from Latin vāgīna, and is therefore a doublet of the later borrowing vagina. Vanilla itself exists as a readily understandable, though not really used, Spanish word: it’s a regularly formed diminutive of the feminine singular form (vana) of the adjective vano (‘vain, futile, pointless’). It doesn’t sound like the English word, because Spanish v is always pronounced like a b (in fact, vainilla was also borrowed into Portuguese as baunilha) and a double l represents a different consonant from a single one.

Speaking of sheaths, the Esperanto suffix -ingo means ‘socket, holder’, as in glavingo (‘scabbard, sheath’), from glavo (‘sword’). Considering the words for ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are viro and virino, respectively, you can probably guess why one of the many Esperanto words coined to serve as the universal insult for a woman, like English slut, is viringo.

Catalan brioixeria (a mass noun meaning ‘buns, bread rolls’, akin to Spanish bollería), and Spanish brujería and Portuguese bruxaria (‘witchcraft’).

Catalan cinc (‘five’) and Spanish cinc (‘zinc’).

Word-final voiceless stops are common in the former language, since it dropped entirely the Latin endings in most masculine native nouns and adjectives (think lupu(m) > llop, ‘wolf’), but not in Spanish, which kept them as -o (lobo). Cinc was tolerated to keep it different from the numeral cinco (also ‘five’). Since Spanish lost its voiced sibilants, an initial z won’t do the trick. A better solution would probably have been to adapt it as cinque, and, in fact, I’m sure that’s the way elderly, uneducated speakers not very exposed to languages with more permissive phonotactics, like English, French or even Catalan, would tend to pronounce it.

Of course, Romance languages which kept their voiced sibilants have no such problem: zinc, the metal, is pronounced differently from cinc, the number, in Catalan, and so are zinco and cinco, respectively, in Portuguese.

English stim and German Stimme (‘voice’). The latter has two syllables, with a final schwa, and the leading S is pronounced like an English sh: /ˈʃtɪmə/.

Since German, featuring this sequence of initial /ʃ/ followed by another consonant, is one of the major sources of Esperanto vocabulary, together with English, French and Latin, in which a regular /s/ in that position is common, both sequences show up often in Zamenhof’s conlang, and there are some minimal pairs: stelo (‘star’, from Latin stella) vs ŝtelo (‘theft’, from German stehlen, cognate to English steal); stato (‘condition, state’, from Latin status or English state or status) vs ŝtato (‘state, government’, from German Staat); spato (‘spar, mineral’) vs ŝpato (‘spade, agricultural implement’).