Sparked by my misuse of the French word "monnaie" as translation of the English word "money" I became again aware that one has to be careful not to see always the same connotation of the word in both languages. Cognates that have a different meaning.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/money
"mid-13c., monie, "funds, means, anything convertible into money;" c. 1300, "coinage, coin, metal currency," from Old French monoie "money, coin, currency; change" (Modern French monnaie), from Latin moneta "place for coining money, mint; coined money, money, coinage," from Moneta, a title or surname of the Roman goddess Juno, near whose temple on the Capitoline Hill money was coined (and in which perhaps the precious metal was stored); from monere "advise, warn, admonish" 
https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/monnaie#:~:text=%C3%89tymologie,l'argent%20lui%2Dm%C3%AAme.

Of course as I said it here many times, if you understand Dutch (and in a lesser way German) and you understand French, you can already roughly understand or at least read English, as there are that many French/Latin words in English (LiR!) and of course the rest are Germanic...
Up to this link even some 58% of Latin/French origin...
https://frenchtogether.com/french-words-in-english/

And yes as I said, they speak also about:
"Some English and French words are written the same way or very similarly but have evolved to have very different meanings"
For instance:
http://transpremium.com/same-word-different-meaning-englishfrench/
The Englishman: I don't want to bless you. The French lady understanding: Je ne veux pas vous blesser...

And if you want the more "edu" version of the history of French words in English:
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/english/documents/innervate/10-11/1011rothhistoryofenglish.pdf

Anyone for comments? Ozymandias...nordmann...comic monster...

"One man's fish is another man's poisson"

I think that was Alan Coren's twist on thje English saying "One man's meat is another man's poison".

Another common cause of confusion - petrol/essence/pétrole/oil,especially on markings on cans in years gone by.

Translations of pétrole

[th]Part of speech[/th][th]Translation[/th][th]Reverse translations[/th][th]Frequencyhelp_outline[/th][th]noun[/th][th] oil[/th][th]petroleum[/th][th]kerosene[/th][th]paraffin oil[/th]

huile, pétrole
pétrole, huile
kérosène, pétrole
pétrole

All these so-called false friends, faux amis, are simply the inevitable consequence of language evolution. Far from being oddities, surely they are to be expected as just a function of how languages develop. While some might be fairly minor and nuanced (eg the French demander, being to ask, rather than the slightly more emphatic English, demand - although the USA and France once nearly went to war over just that misunderstanding), other differences, as you suggest, are more pronounced despite having the same linguistic origins (eg, bibliothèque/librairie - library/bookshop). There are of course also simple linguistic coincidences that can occur in all languages: I can see no etymological link between the French chair, meaning flesh in English, and the English chair, the piece of furniture to be sat on, nor indeed, if considering other languages, between say the etymologically unrelated Italian burro, meaning butter, and the Spanish burro meaning a donkey.

Divergence in language inevitably also occurs between Romance languages, for example rather than being embarrassed, embarazada in Spanish means to be pregnant, while in French embarrasser means to clutter but can also mean to be put in an awkward predicament (I don't know, but that might suggest how the meaning has diverged in all three languages). Nevertheless having said that, I think that English is probably more often the outlier in terms of false friends. For example the English word fastidious, meaning attentive to detail, has come to develop a more positive nuance compared to its cognate counterparts in the Romance languages: fastidioso in Spanish, fastidiós in Catalan, fastidieux in French and fastidioso in Italian. All these words were drawn from the same Latin word fastidium, meaning loathing, dislike or disgust, and the Romance versions have all stayed much truer to the original negative sense, with meanings like annoying, irritating and boring.

Inevitably all languages evolve over time and so, for example, the modern English usage of awkward is rather different to the 17th century meaning of the same word, which was more akin to the modern awesome. Even over the last few years English words like cool, wicked, bad, woke, salty, have all developed additional new meanings. Similarly despite attempts by organisations such as the Académie Française to prevent language 'pollution', it consistently proves impossible to prevent languages absorbing foreign terms: French government documents can use the Gallic-sounding, courriel, as much as they like, but nearly everyone else in the country uses the English word, email.

Languages change over time, it's just what they do, n'est-ce pas?

But more specifically in relation to Paul's initial post, I think French in English vocabulary is often more prevalent in certain specific fields - for instance culinary, legal, fiscal, scientific - rather than in others. For example it has often been observed that as a direct consequence of the Norman Conquest, while the English names of edible beasts often essentially retain the Old English words as used by Saxon peasants: pig/picga, cow/cu, calf/cealf, sheep/sceap, deer/deor etc, they acquire French terms once they've been cooked and so made ready to be served to the Norman lord's table: pork/porc, beef/boeuf, veal/veau, mutton/mouton, venison/venaison. This distinction is still made in modern English: it's always pork pie and beef stew, never pig pie and cow stew. Similarly, while germanic-origin words still exist in use for basic kitchen implements like pot, kettle and knife, more sophisticated culinary terms are often French in origin: saucepan, casserole, roast, fillet, marinade, custard, bechamel, mayonnaise, souffle, vol au vent etc, partly as a consequence of the Norman conquest and French becoming the language at the English court, but also of course a result of the widespread influence of French cuisine from the 17th century onwards.

The Norman Conquest inevitably also changed the legal system of England and introduced French legal terms (while many of the principals of Saxon law were retained, all court preceedings were conducted and recorded exclusively in Norman-French not English) hence words like assizes, attorney, bailiff, chattels, culprit, defendant, escheats, force majeur ... through to tontine, tort and trove, are all modern legal terms derived directly from Old Norman or Anglo-Norman language. Closely related are all the fiscal terms still in regular use in English, such as account, bourse, debt, deposit, exchequer, mortgage, reimburse, tax and treasury, again all with French origins. There is also a vast corpus of scientific or technical terms with their origins in French, or because of common linguistic origins in Latin, that are essentially the same in both English and French.

Thank you very much MM for this splendid résumé. It says all what I yesterday read in my sources as for instance the different evolution of the same word during time in related and even different languages.
It is a perfect and clear survey of what I tried to express yesterday. I am not sure if I could have made it , even in my own native language Dutch.

PS: I wanted to use: "comprehensive" survey, but hesitating and not being sure and at the end I saw that "clear" was better in this context I think ( "comprehensive" perhaps even wrong?)
All to say that one can't perhaps learn a language by reading? The final understanding and using can in my opinion only come after a long time "embedding?" (immersion?) into a native language population?

Thanks again MM for saving my thread and kind regards, Paul.

The word comprehensive itself is obviously related to the French verb, comprendre, meaning to understand, and hence also to the English word, comprehensible, meaning understandable. All three words ultimately derive from the Latin, comprehensibilis, from comprehensus, the past participle of comphrehendere, meaning "able to be understood or capable of being conceived by the mind". In English comprehensible retained much the same meaning as the Latin and French, but comprehensive (probably coming direct from later French, compréhensif, meaning an understanding), developed to mean "a full understanding of everything about something". Hence comprehensive (used as an adjective) now means "including or dealing with all or nearly all elements or aspects of something" and so a comprehensive education or comprehensive school, at least linguistically, is one that covers all areas and is not restricted to certain subjects only.

One of the key aspects of the French influence on English is that for several centuries following the Norman Conquest, the two languages existed alongside each other in parallel: Old English was spoken by the native English peasantry and workers, while Norman French was the language of the law, commerce and the royal court. In the end neither language replaced the other but rather they fused together as Middle English (that's somewhat simplistic of course but you get my drift). Accordingly even today there are usually at least two words for many concepts: one derived from Old English, the other from Old French. Thus you get synonyms like understand and comprehend, motherly and maternal, kingly and royal, smell and odour, buy and purchase, sob and cry, answer and response, friendly and amicable, harbour and port, snake and serpent, wild and savage, wood and forest, stone and rock, weird and strange, need and require, wed and marry, dearth and famine, freedom and liberty, and many, many more. It's one reason why Shakespeare's plays have such a large vocabulary, that and the fact that he also made up new words.

MM, thank you for the "analysis?" (ontleding) of the word "comprehensive".
On a history messageboard some Englishman boasted that the English had the richest vocabulary in the world...
I answered: of course they have for each word two ones, a Romance and a Germanic one...

And according to this source it is a bit complicated...
https://blog.ititranslates.com/2018/03/07/which-language-is-richest-in-words/

language                                                   Words in dictionary
Korean                                                              1.100.373
Japanese                                                              500,000
Italian                                                                  260,000
English                                                                 171,476
Russian                                                                150,000
Spanish                                                                  93,000
Chinese                                                                  85,568

And see even the Italians...

Kind regards, Paul.

Paul,


 You didn't quote the next paragraph:


Maybe English Does Have the Most Words
The Oxford Dictionary says it’s quite probable that English has more words than most comparable world languages. The reason is historical.
English was originally a Germanic language, related to Dutch and German. English shares much of its grammar and basic vocabulary with those languages.
After the Norman Conquest in 1066 English was hugely influenced by Norman French, which became the language of the ruling class for a considerable period, and by Latin, which was the language of scholarship and of the Church.
Very large numbers of French and Latin words entered the language. This melding of languages means English has a much larger vocabulary than either the Germanic languages or the members of the Romance language family according to Oxford.
English builds its vocabulary through a willingness to accept foreign words. And because English became an international language, it has absorbed vocabulary from a large number of other sources.

 Numerous words are classified as English (by the English!), such as whisky, hooligan and bungalow.


 It seems that the English are just better at stealing bits of others' language when it's convenient.

 It makes it interesting if complicated.


 Ciao


bren

bren,

yes those English ones were a bit present all over the world beating the French, who made also an attempt. It is normal that they borrowed here and there a lot of words. The Germans weren't so lucky a bit later, first with the Kaiser and then the one about "Lebensraum" trying for Heartland Eurasia...nor the Russians trying the same bevore, but butting on Britain in Afghanistan...and yes they had later their "revolution"...but what now with the new Russian-Chinese cooperation in Heartland Eurasia?...

Kind regards, Paul.