There is a table of examples in the link. Some I saw include:
Desert
- desert Latin dēserō (“to abandon”) << ultimately PIE **seh₁- (“to sow”)
- Ancient Egyptian: Deshret (refers to the land not flooded by the Nile) from dšr (red)
Shark
- shark Middle English shark from uncertain origin
- Chinese 鲨 (shā) Named as its crude skin similar to sand (沙 (shā))
Kayak
- Inuktitut ᖃᔭᖅ (kayak) Proto-Eskimo *qyaq
- Turkish kayık (‘small boat’)[17] Old Turkic kayguk << Proto-Turkic kay- (“to slide, to turn”)
A lot of these could be TIL posts of their own.
I also wonder if some of these are actually false cognates, or if there is a much earlier common origin with false associations that came afterwards
Ah my favorite false cognate isn’t here, that means I get to post about it!
Emoticon :) is emotion + icon in English, invented in the 80s or early 90s. Exactly what you think.
Emoji is Japanese 絵文字 which basically translates to “picture character”. That word has been around for a long time; I don’t know that I can put a date to it. But certainly a lot older than computers.
They just happen to sound similar
Oh wow, I assumed they were related :)
Related fun fact: emoji is the plural, and the singular is emojus!
Well, no, it’s not, since emoji is not a Latin word. It is a fun factoid though!
Right, for sure if you were to pluralize emoji (which is singular) it wouldn’t be emojus in japanese.
I was gonna toss some guesses here but it’s a word I don’t think you pluralize really, as we don’t in English
Japanese doesn’t have different forms for plural, so “emoji” can be both singular and plural.
yeah, if anything they might collectivize it like “emoji-tachi”. though I’ve never heard it used that way.