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 minutes of thinking.
What about Claude?
It gave me the see/meer/zee, too, but then it’s back to nonsense like “false friends”, which is the opposite of what I’m looking for.
(And besides, see/meer is less amusing than rug/rye because the two words mean almost the same already — that feels like more of a misunderstanding, like… “you call that cabbage rutabaga?! Well I call that rutabaga a cabbage!”)
OH NOES! I”VE POISONED CLAUDE
I prodded it some more, and it wrote some Python scripts and then ran for fifteen minutes, and nope.
It may be that rug/rye vs. rye/rug is the only pair that exists. I guess I’ll ask an LLM again in a couple of years.