The Modern Greek word reh (Ρε) comes from the ancient Greek word Μωρός > Μωρέ, which means “stupid”. In fact, this is where the English word “moron” comes from. So, technically, it is an insult – though many Greeks are unaware of that. The Greek word for “baby”, μωρό, comes from the exact same word. Reh is often added to the beginning or the end of a sentence to add an element of rudeness, or aggression. It’s not exactly a vulgar word, but it’s definitely impolite.

Source: https://realgreekexperiences.com/greek-curse-words

The Arabic word ra’ī (رَأْي), meanwhile, is best known as the name of a genre of Algerian folk music (Raï), which has enjoyed a few stints of worldwide popularity, both on its own and as a source of samples. The intervocalic glottal stop in this word is not distinctly pronounced in the Algerian dialect, and the French were the colonial power there, leading to the romanization raï. It means literally “perception”, and by extension "opinion" or “advice", and is typically inserted — and repeated — by singers to fill time as they formulate a new phrase of improvised lyrics. It comes from the semitic root R-ʔ-Y, having to do with sight and seeing.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/art/rai-musical-style

So ironically enough, these two expressions, from opposite shores of the Mediterranean, come from roots that are roughly opposite in meaning: the Greek one having to do with dullness, and the Arabic one having to do with illumination. But they both have ended up yielding words that add blunt honesty to the phrase to which they’re attached.

I wondered if one might have influenced the other, but no, it’s entirely coincidental. This coincidence is a lot less impressive when you consider that the glottal stop /ʔ/ is a phonemic consonant in Semitic languages, but not Indo-European languages.

Furthermore, the formal Mandarin word for You, 您 (Latin: nín), is very similar too; Informal Swedish you ”du”, is not however.

Carne and karne are pronounced the same. In Swahili it is "karne" and a noun meaning century. In different Romance languages, like Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian, it's "carne" and the word for meat.

English meaning: attentive to detail, meticulous

Italian meaning: annoying!

If you say “lei è una persona molto fastidiosa” it means something very different to “she’s a very fastidious person” in English!

Host in Czech means "guest" in English. The complete opposite!

found this false "enemy", similar to this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/10ik2re/we_know_about_false_friends_but_what_are_some/

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'akiri' in Esperanto means to acquire something, while in Maori it means to discard.

Sources :
https://dle.rae.es/?w=mole (3rd definition)
https://www.dicio.com.br/molho/ (2nd definition)

This has been posted before but people always ignore the ''less spoken'' languages like Dutch and Swedish.

The interesting thing here is that they're all still using the same irregular root. English: be+come, irregular past tense became. In German: be+kommen, irregular past tense: bekam. In Dutch: be+komen, irregular past tense bekwam. Swedish: be+komma, irregular past tense: bekom.

And they ALL have different meanings! (at least in the modern versions of these languages)

In English: to turn/change into something

In German: to receive, to get

In Dutch: to recover from something, to have an effect (obsolete: to receive)

In Swedish: to bother

Fascinating how they all have the same origins , yet developed their own separate meanings.

I can't find much information about the etymology of Spanish saguaro, sometimes spelled (and always pronounced) sahuaro, other than the fact that it entered Mexican Spanish before other dialects, and that it probably comes from Yaquí or another Native American language native to the Sonora, the only place on Earth where saguaros grow.

The similarity to the Arabic word for cactus, though, ṣabar, is striking. (The sound change /w/ <—> /v/ <—> /b/ is very common across all languages.) This same Semitic root yielded Hebrew sabra, which literally also means cactus, but is also used metaphorically to refer to native-born Israelis, for being tough and prickly on the outside, but soft on the inside. Apparently the Semitic root ṣ-b-r has to do with patience and endurance, and the plant name originally referred to various tough, prickly but fleshy Old World plants like aloe, that the New World prickly pear cactus was understandably compared to. A similar historical process explains why the word tobacco, a New World plant, is of Arabic etymology.

I've already explored, both here and in r/etymology, why Spanish alpaca and Arabic al-bakr are false cognates, despite a striking similarity in both word form and meaning. This proposed etymological relationship turned out to be a bit like a Monet painting: beautiful and believably realistic from far away, but less and less so the more you examine the finer details up close. I imagine, therefore, that the same holds true for Spanish saguaro and Arabic ṣabar. The possibility that the two words are related, though tantalizing, becomes more and more improbable and coincidental, the more I look at the historical facts. For one thing, the prototypical cactus, to natives of the Old World, is the prickly pear cactus (genus Opuntia), which had naturalized in the Mediterranean region by the XVI century. The saguaro (genus Carnegiea), meanwhile, has never been successfully naturalized anywhere outside of the Sonora. And, as in the case of the word alpaca, while it's true that the earliest colonial settlers of the Sonora included many Spaniards descended from Muslims and Jews, it's highly unlikely by that point that Semitic languages were enough a part of their lives to influence the nomenclature of new living things they encountered.

Phí = Fee

Cặc = cock (genitalia)

To = tall

Bự = big

Vết tích = vestige

Lừa = lie / trick

Lạc = lost

Giật = Jerk / yeet

Tối nay = tonight

Nỏ (Huế dialect) = no

Mật / mứt = mead (not a false cognate, but cool cognate with English throughProto Indo-European)

Công ty = company

Chia sẻ = to share

Ghẹ / ghệ / gái = girl

Cổ = cou (French) both mean neck

Bánh = pain (French), pan (Spanish) both mean bread

Bò = bovine (French), bó (Irish) both mean cow/bovine

Lãng mạn = roman (French & English)

Chào = ciao (Italian) both are a greeting

Và = ve (Turkish) both mean and

Sữa = ser (Persian) both mean milk

Mắt = mata (Indonesian / Malay, Tagalog), máti (Greek) all mean eye

Đau = dor (Portuguese) both mean pain

Không = geen (Dutch) both mean no (absence)

Dạ = Ja (Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish) meaning yes

Lười = lui (Dutch) both mean lazy

Coi = kijk (Dutch) both mean watch/look

Bông = bloem (Dutch) both mean flower

Rau = rauwkost (Dutch) both mean vegetables

Tiếng = teanga (Irish) both mean language

Gà = Gallo (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian) both mean rooster

Sáu = six, seis, etc. (many Indo-European languages)

Vệ sinh = WC (Dutch pronunciation of WC)

Trăng = chan (Thai) both mean moon. Funfact: Trăng comes from Proto Vietic blang which sounds similar to Indonesian bulan which also means moon

Mây / mưa = Meg (Hindi, meaning (rain)cloud)

Thọ = Tokki / 토끼(Korean, tought to be Sino-Korean but might come from Proto-Tungusic) both mean rabbit

Chết & sống = jukda & salda / 죽다&살다 (Korean, -da is at the end of all verbs in base form in Korean) both mean to die and to live

Chậm chậm = cheoncheonhi /천천히 (Korean) both mean slowly

Kết (thúc) = kkeut / 끝 (Korean) both mean end

Mặt (often pronounced mặc) = muk (Sanskrit, Hindi) both mean face

Chân = zang (Kashmiri, Konkani) both mean leg

Năm = nían 年 (Mandarin, also Cantonese, Korean etc) both mean year

Mà = ma (Italian), maar (Dutch) both mean but

chơi = jeu, jouer (French) both mean play

tốt = top (Dutch) both mean good

hắn = han (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian) both mean he/him

Mình = men (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Turkmen etc.) both mean I/me

Nút = nuppu (Estonian) both mean button

The car was mangled beyond recognition.

Jeg mangler penger. (I don't have money)

All i can find are the wiktionary pages but it doesnt give an exact match just that they’re based on older words that are also pronounced differently, but anyone know if they come from the same PIE word?

I'm a native speaker of American English and lifelong amateur linguist, who is slowly teaching myself Modern Hebrew and Modern Standard Arabic at the same time. I've been warned against doing this by speakers of both languages, on the grounds that these languages are too similar, and I'm liable to get them confused. I haven't heeded this advice, because I'm fascinated by the grammar and word morphology of the Semitic languages, and find that learning a bit of one and a bit of the other actually helps reinforce the aspects of both languages that are odd to my Indo-European sensibilities.

Dictionary browsing is one way I've always increased my vocabulary in a new language I've learned. Playing around on Wiktionary, I've noticed that for nearly any word in Hebrew, there is an Arabic cognate that comes from the same three consonant Semitic root, and vice-versa. There are usually predictable vowel correspondences between the two words as well. Most noticeably, for example, Arabic /ā/ often corresponds to Hebrew /o/.

But not surprisingly, since these two languages diverged centuries ago, these cognates have often come to have very different meanings, implications, and/or uses in the two languages. Often when translating a sentence from one Hebrew to Arabic or vice versa, the grammar is nearly interchangeable. But the vocabulary words themselves, not necessarily at all! Even if the word with the same consonants means roughly the same thing in the other language, it's often the main word for that concept and situation in one language, but an obscure, archaic, or highly niche technical word for the same concept in the other. I might be understood, but it sounds odd, and just isn't how a native speaker would express it. By the same token, when I start from an English word and translate it into both Arabic and Hebrew using Google Translate, the preferred translation is often completely different (that is, from two different Semitic roots) in the two languages. I noticed exactly the same thing when I learned Chinese and Japanese at the same time: often a word written with the same Chinese characters in both languages — clearly cognates, borrowed centuries ago from Chinese into Japanese — would differ markedly in both denotation and connotation between modern Mandarin and modern Japanese.

I once saw a very useful three-column table of false friends between Spanish and Italian. The middle column had the exact cognates in alphabetical order. To the left, in each row, was the word one should use instead if translating from Spanish to Italian. To the right, in each row, was the word one should use instead if translating from Italian to Spanish. For example, one memorable row read:

| notto | nudo | desnudo

Has anyone seen, or made, a similar table for false friends between Modern Hebrew and Modern Standard Arabic?

I might have to make one as I learn. And if I do, I'll post it here.

Saran wrap is a brand name which is a combination of names Sarah and Ann.

Turkish word "saran" comes from the Turkish verb "sarmak" which means "to wrap or to enclose". Saran is a verbal noun which means "something that wraps"

English: wife (married woman)
Middle German: wîp (woman)
German: Weib (an insulting term for women)

German: Frau (woman, Mrs)
Middle German: frouwe (married noblewoman)
Dutch: vrouw (woman)
Swedish: fru (wife, Mrs)

English: queen (female monarch/wife of a king)
Swedish: kvinna (woman)

English: maid (domestic servant or worker)
German: Mädchen (girl) and Maid (domestic servant or worker, sometimes damsel)
Dutch: meisje (girl)

I know most or all of these are cognates - but it's still fun and a little confusing how all of these are slightly different in different languages

If anyone has anything to add, please feel free to do so!

The English "share route", a variation of "share taxi", is often used by native English speaking arrivals to Israel interchangeably, or as the presumed origin of, the local term sherut (שירות), a share taxi/ minibus. But this is actually the Hebrew word for "service", because שירות is a clipping of monit sherut (מונית שירות), literally "service cab".

"Share route", as I've encountered it in Jewish-American English meaning "share taxi in Israel" is an example of not only a false cognate, but also an eggcorn. (I see that r/eggcorn has been for all intensive purposes shot down.) It strikes me that this similarity in sound may not be a coincidence. I know nothing of the history of the sherut in Israel, or this term for it. But I do know that English has been an important, widely used, and widely understood language in that land since at least the fall of the Ottoman Empire. I'm sure at the very least the similarity in sounds of the two terms was noticed early on.

It's a verb meaning "to go" in Spanish and the word for "and" in Lithuanian. I am fluent in Spanish and I want to learn Lithuanian, by the way.

It seems that the origin of the "quinqui" word comes from "quincallería" ("ironmongery") because it originally designated a group of people that worked as travelling ironmongers.

Both probably come from Latin "dolor".

Both come from Latin catena, chain, but their current divergent meaning can be confusing.

English -ism is often used as a word in its own right, to mean "belief" or "idea" (Compare Marcus Garvey's "Isms and schisms"), but this is not considered proper English. Correctly, -ism is a suffix, used to make a self-referential abstract noun, in the form of "Xism is the abstract idea of X." Most proper English words ending in -ism derive from a Greek cognate ending in -ismós, but regardless, all ultimately derive from Proto-Indo-European * -idyéti, the verb-forming suffix, plus * -mós, the abstract noun-forming suffix. So, "the act of doing X", was the basic idea.

Arabic ism (اِسْم‎, also Romanized as 'ism and 2ism, as it begins with a phonemic glottal stop) derives from Proto-Semitic * šim, "name".

The two couldn't possibly be related. Although PIE and PS were contemporary living languages, and almost certainly did loan some words between them, words as basic as "name" are highly unlikely to be borrowed. Plus the completely different set of sound changes leading to the sibilant /s/ in both, pretty much rules out a common derivation further back.

I found the funny way

It’s probably related to the verb “srati” which we also have in Slovene (a vulgar term for defecation). The Ukrainian word for magpie is “soróka” (соро́ка).

When Slovaks come to Slovenia and see bumper stickers like “otrok v avtu” (child in car), they find it very amusing. Unfortunately for them Slovene preserved the original proto-Slavic meaning, while Slovak swapped them. The term “otrok” derives from proto-Slavic verb *otret'i̋, meaning “not (allowed/able of) speaking” (similar to latin “infans”). The word hlapec comes from proto-Slavic *xőlpъ meaning “servant, slave”.

Pronunciation:

• otrok [ɔtˈɾoːk]
• hlapec [ˈxlaːpət͡s]

Slovene pronounciation:

lice [ˈliːt͡sɛ] obraz [ɔbˈɾaːs]