False friends thread

[Raphael]

We also had an English-style breakfast on Sundays, with bacon & eggs and baked beans, which was also unusual at that time.

Sounds like it's still pretty unusual to me.

[Ryusenshi]

English pest (animal causing nuisance) and French peste (the plague)

English pestilence (a devastating infectious disease) and French pestilence (foul smell, stench)

[xxx]

the two are linked, hence the pointed masks used by doctors in times of plague, the distant ancestors of our flat FFP masks.

[WeepingElf]

German, BTW, has Pest 'plague' and Plage 'pest'

[WeepingElf]

A dangerous pitfall for Germans trying to speak English is the German word Fagott 'bassoon' (a loanword from Italian fagotto with the same meaning) which sounds very similar to an English homophobic slur.

[Travis B.]

A dangerous pitfall for Germans trying to speak English is the German word Fagott 'bassoon' (a loanword from Italian fagotto with the same meaning) which sounds very similar to an English homophobic slur.

Interestingly enough, faggot (not fag) in English was originally not a homophobic slur but rather referred to pieces of wood (for burning).

[WeepingElf]

A dangerous pitfall for Germans trying to speak English is the German word Fagott 'bassoon' (a loanword from Italian fagotto with the same meaning) which sounds very similar to an English homophobic slur.

Interestingly enough, faggot (not fag) in English was originally not a homophobic slur but rather referred to pieces of wood (for burning).

Yes. Italian fagotto originally meant 'bundle of twigs, reeds, etc.' and was later transferred to the musical instrument - the words are related.

[RichardFromMarple]

Or a meatball made mostly from offal!

[Lior_C]

Hebrew/Spanish:

מסיבה: Mesibah (Means party in Hebrew)

Masiva: Is the feminine singular for Massive, in Spanish.

I got this false friend from a song in Spanish. I thought it was about parties.

[Lior_C]

I have more in hebrew:

מים: maim, water
ma'am: english

קל: easy (kal)
EDIT: cal (Spanish for lime, the mineral)

[Raphael]

I think I might have found something that might be called an inverse false friends pair, that is, two words that mean the same but look like they mean opposite things:

British English international, noun, "player in one of a number of team sports who plays for their country's national team in international games"

vs

German Nationalspieler, noun, literally "national player" - that is, "player in one of a number of team sports who plays for his country's national team in international games"

[ratammer]

Re dinner etc.: "dinner" for me is my biggest meal of the day, regardless of whether I'm eating it at lunchtime or dinnertime. "I'm having my dinner at lunch" isn't too weird of a sentence for me. On days when I've had dinner at lunchtime, anything I have at dinnertime is just a snack, although I might call it "tea" if I'm pressed to give it a specific name. "Supper" would only make an appearance if for some reason I'm eating something really late - I can't even remember the last time I've done that.

[Travis B.]

There is a generational gap with dinner versus supper in the dialect here. For me, dinner is a large meal eaten in the evening or sometimes in the afternoon and supper simply is not used, but when I was little, my dad, who grew up in the same general area as where I grew up, used supper rather than dinner with roughly the same meaning.