Pull the rug on the rye

There’s an amusing word pair in English and Norwegian: English rug is rye in Norwegian… and Norwegian rye is rug in English! *slaps thigh in amusement* It’s sort of the opposite phenomenon of the “false friend” thing, where the same word has different meanings in different languages. Sort of. If you squint a bit. Of course, this led me to wonder whether there are other word pairs like this… in any language. And this is impossible to google for, because… what are you gonna google for? So a couple of years ago I asked ChatGPT, and it, of course, just output complete nonsense: It’s like… it’s like… Yeah, that’s pretty stupid. But now the LLMs are all brilliant and stuff! Let’s try ChatGPT again. That’s indeed much better! It “understands” what the issue is. But of course “plage” isn’t spelled the same as “plague”, so nope. I prodded it some more, and asked it to take its time: Well, See/meer and meer/zee is pretty close, actually. But no cigar/zeegar, I guess. And that’s after five…