Does the word "bad" mean "good" in some language?

Spanish “yo” means “I” and sounds similar-ish to English “you” - that’s all I got.

Hmmm… the Klingon verb prefix that’s used when there’s a plural subject and singular object is “wI”, which is kinda like English “we”… dammit, there’s no more straws.

It’s all captured in a bi-lingual nursery rhyme:

“me” is who?
“who” is he
“he” is she
… and “dog” is a fish!

(although the last one does not work as well for the current [non-ashkenazi] Hebrew pronounciation rules – I’d say it more like “dug.” Oh well)

Reminds me a little of the D’Antin (sp?) Manuscript - it has English nursery rhymes “translated” into pseudo-French - a mixture of French words and made up words that approximate the sounds of the English.

One of them goes like this - see if you can figure it out. Read it as French but hear it as English:

Un petit d’un petit, s’etonne aux Halles
Un petit d’un petit,
A degres te falle.

I get it. :wink: You know, I went to the banks of the Potomac just above Washington, DC, and I saw the Great Falls.

Borrowing from Persian was something I had once considered, but dropped. I’m now certain they’re cognates. I should have phrased it differently. I suppose we could say the Persians had the word first, but only because Persian has a longer history than English. But both can trace it back to the same origin at the same time depth, so it isn’t entirely accurate to say Persian has had it longer. Contemporary Persian is as drastically changed from the Old Persian of the Achaemanids as modern English is changed from Proto-Germanic, 500 BCE.

Speaking of Germanic: what’s the etymology of a German word for bad, bös? It doesn’t look like it could be a cognate of the English word, but I just wondered.

Which in turn means asshole in Spanish. The physical part, not the personal classification.