When ideas fail, words come in very handy (Goethe)

We linguists engage, among other things, in comparing languages and exploring their histories, in order to find universal properties of language as well as to account for its development and origins.

Languages are sometimes genetically related, i.e.  descended from the same mother language. For instance, Italian & Spanish are “sisters”, having both Latin for a “mother”. The same goes for English and German, although these two are “cousins”, both belonging to the West Germanic branch. As you have probably noticed, genetically related languages belong to the same family and are described in terms used to describe family members.

Problem is, there are many cases where one identifies similarity between two languages and mistakenly assumes they are genetically related. For instance, the word “mucho” in Spanish and the English “much”, both sound quite similar and share the same meaning, yet English and Spanish are not genetically related.   

Comparing the vocabulary of the English language with that of French can be even more deceiving, as in fact almost 60% (!) of the English vocabulary is originated from French. This is due to the fact that during the Norman Conquest (starting in 1066) English was displaced by French, which became the language of the ruling class – of the Court, the nobility, the Church and the schools. During that era, a vast amount of French vocabulary entered the English language. That is called borrowing. Hence, “noble” (adj.), distinguished by rank or title, entered the English when it was called Middle English from Old French and from Latin before it. Similarly, the word “judge”, can be traced back to French and Latin.

Therefore, when trying to establish a genetic relation between two (or more) languages, one must not rely on comparison between their lexicons (vocabularies), although it’s very tempting to do so, because it may lead to the wrong conclusion.

Words in different languages may quite often sound the same. This has nothing to do with sharing the same origin or borrowing words form one another.  

Hebrew and English are certainly not genetically related. Once this is established,  we will reveal to you some words which sound exactly the same in both languages, yet have completely different meanings. Let’s start with the English “who” which in Hebrew is “he”; the English “he” is in Hebrew “she” and “me” is the Hebrew “who”. Are you laughing (crying) yet?.

Maybe it will be less confusing in table, as follows: 

English “who” is Hebrew “he”; English “he” is Hebrew “she” and English “me”  is Hebrew “who”.

Here are some more weird phonetic twins worth memorizing:

The English “sum” is “drug” in Hebrew.

The English “kiss” is “pocket” in Hebrew. (Save your kisses for me…)

The English “gun” is “garden” in Hebrew. (Was this the idea behind Guns N’ Roses?)

The English “butt” is “girl” in Hebrew. (Interesting???!!!)

The English “dear” is “shed” in Hebrew while the English “shed” is “ghost” in Hebrew.

The English “shore” is “bull” in Hebrew while the English “bull” is “stamp” in Hebrew.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to try and write a short paragraph composed of the above English words, and then translate it into Hebrew?