False friends

[Pupunen]

The Finnish phrase katso merta ("look at the sea") sounds almost exactly like the Italian swearwords cazzo and merda. I lived in Italy for three years as a teenager, and it was quite difficult to completely avoid using the verb katsoa ("to look"), especially since a lot of other words have been derived from it. I remember getting some raised eyebrows when I said the word katsomo ("bleachers/stands"), for example.

[Cliodna]

Here are a few Estonian and Finnish ones:

Estonian says: Onk kaik ruumit koristellu?

What a Finn hears: Are all the corpses decorated?

What the Estonian actually said: Are all the rooms cleaned?

You gave the finnish sentence. The estonian for "Are all the rooms cleaned?" would be "On kõik ruumid koristatud?". It's still pronounced relatively similar to the finnish sentence.
I'll add a few more false friends I know about:

:finland: Talo = House | :estonia: Talu = Farm
:finland: Viineri = Pastry | :estonia: Viiner = A sausage
:finland: Linna = Castle | :estonia: Linn = City
:finland: Kaupunki = City | :estonia: Kaup = Product
:finland: Kalju = Bald | :estonia: Kalju = Cliff
:finland: Pikku = Small | :estonia: Pikk = Long
And finally:
:finland: Katso = to look | :estonia: Katsu = touch
That was an especially difficult one for my classmates to remember. Turned an innocent schooltext about a visit to the ophthalmologist into a horror story about doctors poking the patients in their eye.

[Eslenna]

tull means customs(the type that's on airports and borders) in Swedish and nonsense in Norweigan.

[Maglor]

"Kanava" means "Channel" in Suomi, but in Russian it means "Ditch". Well, at least one common word in our languages...
Also I wonder if there's more of such words in "karjalan kieli" (Karelian)

[Annuil]

"Kanava" means "Channel" in Suomi, but in Russian it means "Ditch". Well, at least one common word in our languages...
Also I wonder if there's more of such words in "karjalan kieli" (Karelian)

Haha, that’s interesting, I’ve never heard of this one.
There is also a Finnish word “majakka” (a light-house) that corresponds with Russian word ”маяк” ([majak]) and actually means “a light house”, but this one is not exactly a “false” friend, this one actually means what it sounds like 

Also, Maglor, welcome to the forum! You can visit the Introduction Thread on General Discussion Board to say hi to everyone! 

[Maglor]

Ok)
There's also one interesting lingustic thing (not a false friend tho).
In all of Russian sources up untill XIX century all the ugorian people (there are lot of them in Russia) had been called "chood'" or "white-eyed chood'". Which is a root to our words "choodesnyi" (wanderfull), "choodnyi" (marvelous) and "choodnoy" (weird). Since those people were here (territory of modern Russia I mean) for allmost as long as slavs (or mb even longer) tere's also a few legends that give that name to some sort of magical people like fairy, or elves or dwarves.

[Annuil]

Huh, that’s a very interesting fact. I wonder if they called the ugorian people this way because their language sounded weird to them? And also they were foreign, which means they were weird/strange/unknown to the Russians, so that might also be the reason for the usage of that word.

[JoB]

I recently learned two things about terms for furniture:

• The correct German term for what's called a pouffe in English or pouf in French - i.e., a fully upholstered footstool / seat with neither arm- nor backrest, usually seating only one person - is indeed Puff. It predates the meaning the average German would think of when hearing "Puff" today, namely, a brothel. (I fell into that particular rabbit hole after seeing a discounter's ad announcing a "Kinder-Sitzpuff", i.e., a "sitting Puff for children". Note that it is similarly problematic to use the French spelling in Britain, too.)
• Random find while trying to work my way out of said rabbit hole: While English would allow to call the thing an ottoman instead, the German term Ottomane (top photo only, the second's just to illustrate the false English friend) requires enough length to lie down on it, and the presence of curved armrests, if not a (partial or full) backrest as well.

[Mirasol]

• Random find while trying to work my way out of said rabbit hole: While English would allow to call the thing an ottoman instead, the German term Ottomane (top photo only, the second's just to illustrate the false English friend) requires enough length to lie down on it, and the presence of curved armrests, if not a (partial or full) backrest as well.

Huh, looks like the game Sims4 fell into that trap. My settings there are set on German, and the game refers to one item that may be an ottoman in English as an "Ottomane". It´s clearly not made to lie down on it.

I´d have some Finnish-German false friends to offer:

"ja" means "and" in Finnish but "yes" in German. Becomes infinitly funnier if you talk Finnish to a German who doesn´t understand it and thinks they recognized a familiar word.
"susi" means "wolf" in Finnish but is a female first name in German. I remember it was on one of the wolf-beast´s infopages and I nearly lost it when I read that.*
"oma" means "own" in Finnish but "grandma" (or rather "granny" or some kind of nickname) in German

(But actually, I´m often surprised that there are quite a few words that are almost or even exactly the same as in German, like "auto"="car", "tee"="tea" or "radio", which coincidentally even means the same thing in English)

*On a related note, but it´s a false friend from Turkish: The word for "mom" in Turkish, "Anne", is a female first name in German as well. In my kindergarten were quite a few kids whose first language was Turkish and who referred to their mothers that way. This led 3/4-yearold-me to believe that the mother of all the Turkish kids is named Anne. The kid who ended up explaining to me how wrong I was was quite ammused.[/list]

[Maglor]

And also they were foreign, which means they were weird/strange/unknown to the Russians

Not as foreign as other foreigners. Told you' they've been here for allmost as long as us. And tho germanic peoples are geneticly closer to slavs, we shared a territory with ugorians more.
Germanic peoples are closer to ancient Rus' nobility, and "middle class", especially since Roerich
PS: Another false friend here.
There are two big figures in Russian history, who's names are written wrong in Russian and sound different that way, but, being written right, sound the same way:
Roerich of Frisland - the primogen of our royal family, and Yuri Roerich - XX-century artist.

[Maglor]

"ja" means "and" in Finnish but "yes" in German.

Kek. In Russian it means "I". Or "I am")

[JoB]

PS: Another false friend here.
There are two big figures in Russian history, who's names are written wrong in Russian and sound different that way, but, being written right, sound the same way:
Roerich of Frisland - the primogen of our royal family, and Yuri Roerich - XX-century artist.

... I'm a bit confused there. Yuri (later: George) Roerich is labelled a tibetologist on Wikipedia, with "painter" and "writer" (and a lot more) being occupations attributed to his father Nicholas. Also, Rurik (etymologically connected to the first name Roderick) reportedly was a Varangian (so, a Viking hailing from Sweden) and is theorized to possibly be the same person as king Rorik of Dorestad; only the latter would connect him to Frisia ...

... and again, not at all what a German today would feel reminded of by that term ...

[Raaffiie]

Now that I think about it, prima is a really interesting Dutch word, which originally comes from the Italian word, but doesn't carry the usual meaning of 'first'. Apparently it was originally used in trading to indicate that goods were of prima kwaliteit(prime quality), and from there it came to mean 'excellent' in a more general sense. Nowadays it's not only used to mean 'excellent', but also 'fine' as in 'that's fine, no problem'. It's a very common word in everyday conversation, and one that hardly seems to be thought of as a loan word.

[Songbird]

Now that I think about it, prima is a really interesting Dutch word, which originally comes from the Italian word, but doesn't carry the usual meaning of 'first'. Apparently it was originally used in trading to indicate that goods were of prima kwaliteit(prime quality), and from there it came to mean 'excellent' in a more general sense. Nowadays it's not only used to mean 'excellent', but also 'fine' as in 'that's fine, no problem'. It's a very common word in everyday conversation, and one that hardly seems to be thought of as a loan word.

It's still used to indicate excellence in Portuguese in a very specific expression: Obra prima - masterpiece

I don't recall any other usage for it though and we have different words using the prim- root meaning "first".


Two from Portuguese x English:

Assalto - Robbery; it almost implies armed
Espancar - To beat, as in battery. No other connotation. I fell for this one and accidentally used "spanked" in a TTRPG once... Awkward!

[JoB]

Found more or less by chance today: The French acolyte has rather little to do with its English counterpart; it leans more toward "co-conspirator" or "partner in crime".