cognate

Words are cognate if they stem from a common root.

My favorite false cognate in German is "das Gift", which in English is in fact "poison".

The "dar" is from "dear", and the Swedish cognate for dear is "dry", which means "expensive" in modern Swedish.

So a "false cognate" actually would mean words that appear to have come from the same historical roots but don't really.

Plus, the fact that the term is actually an anti-cognate adds a third layer of irony, which is kind of cool in and of itself.

Words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages.

I note that the writer has fallen into the trap of a false cognate - or, at least, a near-homonym - by writing "demure" when he/she meant "demur".

It's not hard to learn the difference, but the article's point in calling it a "false cognate" is just to note that there _is_ an unexpected difference.

I think there were about 20 or so common ones, and every single one has a cognate in Swedish that starts with an audible k, and same for words like gnat.

The original context the writer is most certainly French where actuel means current, however the usage generates a false cognate.

It defines an alias for true called otherwise, so it would beif x > y -> true; otherwise -> false; endUsing otherwise makes it a loss less ugly, and I guess fixes the false cognate.