I’ve noticed a handful of bilingual anagrams where the words mean the same thing. Note that the words have to be spelled differently in the two languages but with the same set of letters. So the fact that every language on Earth† has the word covid with the same meaning is not sufficient. Since it’s always spelled the same, it does not qualify for this question.
Anyway, here’s the handful of examples:
- German: mein, English: mine
- Spanish: capitán, English: captain
- German: Rhein, English: Rhine
OK, the Spanish example is imperfect because of the accent mark, but I’m going with it just because I know of so few. Can anyone come up with any others?
†Well, every language that uses the Latin alphabet. Although I’ve seen Chinese writing with “COVID” embedded in it, so maybe some others too.
In all three of your examples the words are cognates. I think it would be even more interesting to find examples where the words are completely unrelated.
The only example I can think of is English “evil” and French “vile”.
I found one: “and” in Malay is “dan.”
(I didn’t cheat by asking Google for an example, but I did look through basic vocabulary lists of three languages I have some exposure to.)
I thought of one: “het” in Dutch can be translated to either “it” or “the” depending on the exact context. So the second one is an anagram and probably not a cognate.
Good one. You’re right — they aren’t cognates. “Het” (like English “that”) is ultimately from PIE “ke-,” while English “the” is from PIE “so-.”
French “Etats” is English “state”, backwards. Not quite a perfect one, since it’s a French plural to the English singular, but close. Pretty sure that’s a cognate, though.
The Spanish masculine singular word for “the” (el) is an anagram of the equivalent word in French (le).
Rein is a word in German (pure), French (kidney) and obviously in English. Totally unrelated and non-cognate. Only example I know (except for obvious borrowings like sport) and you don’t even have to anagram them.