Why do some words in different languages have the same multiple meanings?

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Take the English word “right”. It can mean “true, correct”, but it can also be used in something like “human rights”.

Now take the Arabic word حق. Again, it can mean “true, correct” and the “rights” in “human rights”.

It makes sense for a word to have the same single meaning across different languages. But what is the likeliness that two languages have a word that share the same multiple meanings?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Reasonably high, particularly if those languages might have a common root. But this is a kind of sampling bias; we notice coincidences that stand out. Most words in English and Arabic will not line up this way, but there are **a lot of words** in both languages, so the odds that it might happen at least a handful of times is pretty high, especially from two languages geographically close to each other like English and Arabic (remember that the numbers we use in English are even Arabic numerals). It would be more surprising if you found two words that had similar homonyms in very far separated languages, like Ethiopian and Navajo.

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