I have found this curious list of English names meanings when they are written in other languages:

Adam (Arabic) skin

Alan (Indonesian) comedian

Alf (Arabic) thousand, millennium

Anna (Arabic) moans and groans

Calista (Portuguese) chiropodist

Camilla (Spanish) stretcher

Cilla (Zarma, Nigeria) basket

Doris (Bajan, Barbados) police van

Eliza (Basque) church

Eve (Rapa Nui, Easter Island) buttocks

Fay (Zarma, Nigeria) divorce

Fred (Swedish, Danish and Norwegian) peace

Jim (Korean) baggage

Kim (Ainu, Japan) mountain

Kylie (Dharug, Australia) boomerang

Laura (Greek) groups of monks’ huts

Luke (Chinese) traveller

Marianna (Italian) accomplice who tells a gambler the cards held by other players

Sara (Hausa, Nigeria) snakebite

Sid (Arabic) plaster

Susan (Thai) cemetery

Vera (Italian) wedding ring

Conclusions cannot always be drawn about historical connections. Some words are similar in numerous languages.  Linguistic research has led to the theory of an Ur-language (Indo-European) spoken some fifty thousand years ago, from which most other languages have descended. Papa, for example, is used for ‘father’ in seventy percent of languages across the world.

Meanwhile, essential latterday vocabulary has crossed languages as easily as the jet-setting executive who uses it:

 Taxi is spelt and means the same in French, German, Swedish, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Czech, Slovak, Portuguese, Hungarian and Romanian

 Sauna is spelt and means the same in Finnish, English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch, Danish, Lithuanian, Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian, Romanian and Norwegian

 Bank is spelt and means the same in Afrikaans, Amharic (Ethiopia), Bengali, Creole, Danish, Dutch, Frisian (Germany and Holland), German, Gujarati (India), Hungarian, Indonesian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Sinhala (Sri Lanka), Swedish and Wolof (Senegal and Gambia)

 Hotel is spelt and means the same in Afrikaans, Amharic, Asturian (Spain), Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Frisian (Germany and Holland), Galician (Spain), German, Icelandic, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Tswana (Botswana), Ukranian and Yiddish.

On the tiny mountainous Canary Island of La Gomera there is a language called Silbo Gomero that uses a variation of whistles instead of words (in Spanish silbar means to whistle). There are tour ‘vowels’ and tour ‘consonants’, which can be strung together to form more than tour thousand ‘words’. This birdlike means of communication is thought to have come over with early African settlers over 2500 years ago. Able to be heard at distances of up to two miles, the silbador was until recently a dying breed. Since 1999, however, Silbo has been a required language in La Gomera schools.

The Mazateco Indians of Oxaca, Mexico, are frequently seen whistling back and forth, exchanging greetings or buying and selling goods with no risk of misunderstanding. The whistling is not really a language ore even a code; it simple uses the rhythms and pitch of ordinary speech without the words. Similar whistling languages have been found in Greece, Turkey and China, whilst other forms of wordless communication include the talking drums (ntumpane) of the Kele in Congo, the xylophones used by the Northern Chin of Burna, the banging on the roots of trees practised by the Melanesians, the yodeling of the Swiss, the humming of the Chekiang Chinese and the smoke signals of the American Indians.

Cursing and swearing are practised worldwide, and they generally involve using the local version of a small set of words describing an even smaller set of taboos that surround God, family, sex and the more unpleasant body functions. Occasionally, apparently inoffensive words acquire a darker overtone, such as the Chinese wang bah dahn, which literally means a turtle egg but is used as an insult for politicians. And offensive phrases can often be beguilingly inventive:

 
Zolst farliren aleh tseyner achitz eynm, un dos zol dir vey ton (Yiddish) may you lose all your teeth but one and may that one ache

Así te tragues un pavo y todas las plumas se conviertan en cuchillas de afeitar (Spanish) may all your turkey’s feathers turn into razor blades

When it comes to personality, some people seem to have been put on the planet to make life easier for everyone else:

 
Cooperar: (Spansih, Central America) to go along willingly with someone else to one’s own disadvantage. 

Abozzare: (Italian) to accept meekly a far from satisfactory situation. 

Ilunga: (Tshiluba, Congo) someone who is ready to forgive any abuse the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time 

Flattering
 
Vaseliner: (French) to flatter (literally, to apply Vaseline) 

Happobijin: (Japanese) a beauty to all eight directions (a sycophant) 

Radfahrer: (German) one who flatters superiors and browbeats subordinates (literally, a cyclist) 

Fawning 

The Japanese have the most vivid description for hangers-on: kingyo no funi. It literally means ‘goldfish crap’ –a reference to the way that a fish that has defecated often trails excrement behind it for some time.

Sweet-talking others is one thing; massaging your own ego can be another altogether:

Echarse flores: (Spanish) to blow your own trumpet (literally, to throw flowers to yourself) 

Il ne se mouche pas du pied: (French) he has airs above his station (literally, he doesn’t wipe his nose with his foot) 

Yi luan tou shi: (Chinese) courting disaster by immoderately overestimating one’s own strength (literally, to throw an egg against a rock) 

Tirer la couverture a soi: (French) to take the lion’s share, all the credit (literally, to pull the blanket towards oneself)

The last words in a lifetime are significant just for that fact. Many important people have carefully selected them; in some other cases death took them a little by surprise. Some last words sum up a life’s path, some… well, some are just silly. Some are totally true, the rest, perhaps a little suspicious. Let’s take a look:

“Je vais ou je vas mourir, l’un et l’autre se dit ou se disent”
(Translation: “I am about to — or I am going to — die: either expression is correct”)

- Dominique Bouhours
(a French grammarian)

“LSD, 100 micrograms I.M.”

- Aldous Huxley
(in a note to his wife - she obliged and he was injected twice before his death)

“Put out the bloody cigarette!”

- Saki, AKA Hector Hugh Munro
(spoken to a fellow officer while in a trench during World War One, for fear the smoke would give away their positions. He was then shot by a German sniper who had heard the remark)

“¡Carajo, un balazo!”
(Translation: “Damn! A bullet!”)

- Antonio José de Sucre
(after being shot while riding his horse in the Colombian jungle on his way home. He was said to have been a fine gentleman who had never cursed until that day, according to Ricardo Palma’s “Tradiciones en Salsa Verde”)

“That was the best ice-cream soda I ever tasted”

- Lou Costello

Some of the most fascinating examples of similarities and differences between languages are found in idioms and set expressions. Language learners are often surprised when a rather unusual expression has a word-for-word equivalent in another language. Just as often, they may be surprised to find that an expression does not have an equivalent in another language or that the equivalent differs in some ways.

Here are some expressions that rather unexpectedly have very similar equivalents in English, Spanish, and Russian – three languages that, although related, are quite far removed in most ways:

English: to shed crocodile tears
Russian: lit’ krokodilovy slyozy
Meaning: to pretend to cry in order to gain sympathy

English: to hit the ceiling
Spanish: tocar el cielo con las manos (literally “to take the sky in one’s hands”)
Meaning: to reach the limit; usually of your patience

English: to know something inside out
Russian: znat’ vdol’ I poperyok (literally “to know something lengthwise and crosswise”)
Meaning: to know something very well

English: to have nine lives
Spanish: tener siete vidas (literally “to have seven lives”)
Russian: dvuzhil’niy (literally “one with two lives”)
Meaning: to be good at avoiding death/danger

English: “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”
Russian: “v Tulu so svoim samovarom ne ezdyat” (literally “don’t go to Tula with your own samovar”).
Meaning: When visiting a strange place, it’s best to follow the lead of the locals

On the other hand, there are no equivalents in English for the following Spanish idioms - see if you can guess what they mean from their literal translation:

cara de viernes (literally “Friday face”) :: a thin, wan face
decir cuatro verdades (literally “to tell four truths”) :: to speak one’s mind freely
saber más que las culebras (literally “to know more than the snakes”) :: to be cunning

At the same time, no language seems to have a word for word equivalent for the English expression “to go bananas” - although there is always a way to express the concept of craziness, no other language seems to use a fruit to draw the comparison between sanity and ‘going a little bit nuts’ (or perhaps in this case, a little ‘fruity’).

As a Spanish language teacher I have learnt to value the ever-valiant attempts made by students in their effort to speak their new language. It is clear that, when using a foreign language, the sound of their speech will be slightly, if not totally different from the one of the natives. This means they are never free from making “mistakes”; though this is far from being an obstacle, instead being is a great way to improve.

Nonetheless, one of the most frequent kinds of mistakes heard in the classroom represents a good clue in appreciating the gradual learning process of new grammar: the error of ‘regularization’.

In a way, second language students take the role of young children acquiring their mother tongue. There are wide differences from a psycholinguistics point of view, as children do not have a previous grammar to hinder the internalization of a new one (that is why we ‘acquire’ our first language when we are young, but ‘learn’ a second one when adults).

Once we have made a distinction between adult students and children, I would like to mention one of the coincidences I found: there is a clear tendency make words regular. For instance, it is not unusual that a student says “no sabo” in order to say “I don’t know”, which does not exist in Spanish, and is a mistake for sure (“no sé” is the correct form). However, more important than the specific inaccuracy, is the fact they have shown that they are not just learning a list of words by heart, but learning a new grammar. They have learnt the rule that says ‘take the ending off the infinitive and add ‘o’ to get the form for the present indicative first person singular’. In this case, it didn’t work because for irregular verbs there are no general rules. However, this student has shown themselves to be capable of conjugating most Spanish verbs correctly, even if it is the first time they’ve come across them - but now it’s time for them to memorise the exceptions!

“False friends” (a word in another language that closely resembles a word in somebody’s first language, but means something different) are practical proof for the fact that seemingly different languages have at one point been strongly connected: the form remains identical, or at least recognizable, but the meaning has subtly shifted in one or both languages from its original definition.

So, with that in mind, can you translate these Spanish words into English without using a dictionary? Hover your mouse pointer over the box to the right to reveal the correct answer, and the answer a native English speaker might have been expecting.

Adepto :: follower, supporter (NOT adept)

América :: the Americas (NOT America specifically)

Embarazada :: pregnant (NOT embarrassed)

Librería :: bookstore (NOT library)

Parientes :: relatives (NOT parents)

Sensible :: sensitive (NOT sensible)

Soportar :: tolerate, deal with (NOT support)

Do you know other false friends? Many linguists have at least one amusing anecdote involving these tricky words. For example, the famous song “Sympathy for the Devil” is known in Spanish as “Simpatía por el demonio” which actually means “Affection for the Devil”. The correct translation should have been “Compasión por el demonio”.