Comment by eigenspace
17 hours ago
That was my first thought too! So many things in old-english are very very close to modern German, so it's sometimes surprising to see these false-friends.
17 hours ago
That was my first thought too! So many things in old-english are very very close to modern German, so it's sometimes surprising to see these false-friends.
Contrary to what GP said, they're not false friends. They're a (lost) part of English's Germanic roots, shared with modern German.
Edit: Check out the Proto-Germanic personal pronouns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Proto-Germanic_person...
Based on the page you linked, they pretty clearly are false friends: Old English unc is unrelated to modern German uns, it is related instead to Old Germanic unk (while modern German uns is just Old Germanic uns).
Oh, you mean “Falsche Freunde”?
I have no idea how to say that idiomatically in German, but it struck me that those are both “true” friends.