Bilingual anagrams

Factual Questions
1

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.

2

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”.

3

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.)

4

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.

5

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-.”

6

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.

7

The Spanish masculine singular word for “the” (el) is an anagram of the equivalent word in French (le).

8

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.

9

The OP is asking for words that have the same meaning. So “rein” doesn’t qualify.

10

But it was an interesting bit of trivia. So maybe start a different thread for words that have different meanings in three or more languages.

11

Oh, there will be many. Look up any short word, and there’s a good chance Wiktionary will have a list of languages – sometimes ten or more – with a definition for that word. Usually most of them are indeed borrowings, but quite often at least a few of them are not.

The “rein” example is interesting because the three unrelated meanings are from big, Western European languages. But with over six thousand languages in the world, such coincidences can’t be rare.

12

Here’s a pretty boring one: theater in (American) English and theatre in French. Also center and centre. Probably lots like that. Of course, these are direct borrowings.

13

Yeah there’s a lot like that: blue/bleu, saber/sabre, meter/metre, liter/litre and I’m sure a whole lot more.

14

I had planned on excluding these in the OP, but then forgot when I actually wrote it. There’s around 20 or so -er/-re variants between American and British spellings, and I expect all of them are direct borrowings from French as modified by Noah Webster.

15

These are cognates; they both derive from the Latin pronoun ille (as does Italian il).

16

I just want to say, as the originator of this thread, I have no problem with cognates. Except for the -er/-re ones I meant to exclude.

17

Then I’m throwing in the interesting example of English standstill, German Stillstand. Same meaning, in both languages a compound of two monosyllabic words, and each of the two words has the same meaning in both languages, but the order is reversed. (And in German, the noun is capitalised, because all nouns are.)

18

Friends and former colleagues of mine have put up a page with Spanish / English false friends, which comes close to what you say. Only in two languages though, and only in one direction, but it’s a start:

Somewhere hidden in that list there are probably also some bilingual anagrams with different meanings.

19

But the e (accented) in French is a replacement of “es”, so Etats is really estats. SSSo again you get your anagram but for a different reason.