I think a war following an elopement would qualify as a misunderstanding. Ergo, Helen of Troy.
And then there was the matter of a pig between the Hatfields and the Maccoys.
I defer to the historians on the actual events, but I have often noted that an accurate Japanese <> English translation dictionary would be about half blank. Japanese is a high-context language – never let your attention wander during a conversation in Japanese, because often the actual subject will be mentioned once and then everyone will use either indexicals or nothing at all in its place for the rest of the dialogue. Translators of media like video games, anime, or manga frequently run into places where they have to pick a random pronoun to use for a character, because that character’s gender is literally never, at any point, mentioned or even hinted at anywhere in the work.
More relevant here is the Japanese inclination to use their weird writing system for puns and ambiguity. Compound words are made by just smashing together characters that mean the thing you want with no clarifying internal grammar. Think of it like the compound “stoplight”. We mean that as “a light that indicates you should stop”, but because we’ve just smashed things together with no grammatical tags to clarify their relationship, we could just as easily interpret it as “something which stops a light from shining”.
“Mokusatsu” is literally the two characters for “to stop speaking/leave something as it is” and “kill”. It refers to a sort of formal version of jamming your fingers in your ears and going ‘la la la can’t hear you!’ because you don’t care, you don’t think it’s worth responding to, and you want the other person to know that. There’s no circumstance I can think of in which this would be conversationally understood to mean ‘we will murder you silently’, but the choice to use that specific word, which so far as I know is always spelled with those specific characters, had to be intentional, and it was meant to sound like a veiled threat.
And a pig almost caused the US and the UK to go to war!
It could be argued that a considerable amount of the tension between Parliament and the American Colonies was the result of misunderstanding. There were supporters of American rights in parliament, but they were not in the majority, and the majority party essentially ignored their efforts to explain the colonists’ positions because they held a comfortable majority. The misunderstandings, of which there were many over a considerable period of time, increasingly led to unrest and eventually war.
Some other incident would have triggered WWI. Taking the correct route would have been an improvement for Archduke Ferdinand, but would likely not have changed the course of the 20th century substantially.
Yeah, I know that every little spark would have caused war in 1914, but this spark WAS Ferdinand’s assassination, and it was a mighty fluke.
Not sure of the accuracy, but as I read it some years back:
On an early expedition in the Himalayas, 1920 or thereabouts, a European spotted some dark forms moving about in the distance, which had disappeared by the time he got close. Asking the locals what they were, they replied with the words, “metoh-kangmi”, which basically means “snow creatures”. When he sent word of the creatures back home, it was miscommunicated as “metch-hangmi”, loosely translated as, “abominable snowman”. And a cryptozoological marvel was born!
Back in the 1960s when Kennedy and his advisors were discussing options on how to respond to the Soviet missiles in Cuba, the opinion was leaning towards an air strike to wipe out the missile sites. However, one of the advisors mentioned that the missiles were “mobile” meaning they could, with enough time, be removed from their silos and relocated. However, Kennedy misunderstood “mobile” to mean that the missiles were mounted on trucks and thus, there was no way of knowing exactly where they were. That’s why they switched from an attack to a blockade.
(No cite but a story from an old Poli-Sci professor.)
We will bury you! perhaps?
Treaty of Wuchale between Ethiopia and Italy. The Amharic treaty basically said that Ethiopia could use Italian channels to conduct foreign affairs, if they so chose. The Italian translation suggested that they will do so, thus removing Ethiopian autonomy. This lead to the First Italo-Ethiopian war, more concrete independence, and embarrassment for the Italian military.
Even weirder, though not a misunderstanding - there was an assassination attempt earlier, and Ferdinand stayed to meet with the injured. Princip happened to be at the same place, laying low.
In a nutshell: the US should not have been involved in the War of 1812, but the “We want to be your buddies” decree took too long to get here from England. Or some such.