A false friend is a word in one language that, while it may be etymologically related to a very similar word in another language, doesn't mean the same thing at all and leads to mistaken translations. An example would be actual in Spanish, which means 'current, present', not the same as actual in English.

There is another class of word pairs, words in different languages that look very similar and mean almost the same thing, but are not at all related. Somewhere there is a site that lists many pairs of these words and I have lost track of where it is. Can anyone help me? If it's on Max's site of links I can't find it.

googl'ing 'false cognates' yields a lot, including:

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/False cognate

Don't know if it's what you're after, but...

I believe bad in Farsi means 'bad'.

Thanks for the term "false cognates", Rock Island. Unfortunately it's too often used when "false friends" is meant that it makes it hard to weed out the false leads. The most productive links are all quoting a Wikipedia article that does mention a couple of interesting examples; the Mbabaram (an Australian Aboriginal language) dog which means dog, for one. There are also mentions of the kinship terms ma, pa, etc, which are hors concours for reasons discussed elsewhere. But we're on the right track.

In reply to:

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I believe bad in Farsi means 'bad'

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My Oxford Hindi-English dictionary says that "bad" in Hindi means "bad" in English, and lists its etymoolgy as "P.", for Persian, so, unsurprisingly, you are right again, jheem.

Ta, max. Do all the entries have etymologies? I might look into a copy. Right now I have an ancient edition of Bhargava's E-H-E in 2 vols by Prof. Pathak. It was cheap and the illustrations are cool, but it would be nice to have a more lexicographical dictionary.

>Do all the entries have etymologies?

My bad(or should that be, meera bad)! "Etymology" is not the right word. Every entry has only an indication of its origin, S[anskrit], A[rabic], P[ersian], Brbh [Brajbhasa], etc.

It's not a lexicographical work really. To paraphrase another ancient literary masterpiece, it scored over older, more pedestrian works in two important respects: First, it was much cheaper, and second, it's paperback, so the shipping costs from Amazon.com to Zild were not prohibitive. It's not even E-H-E, just H-E. That at least means a reasonably comprehensive number of entries without an unwieldy size.

Checking for the link at Amazon, I see that the price is now $24.50US, down from the $32 I paid.

meera bad

Ah, then I'll stick with Professor Pathak. At $8 per volume and a hearty hardcover to boot, it's sufficient.