Phono-semantic matching

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phono-semantic_matching

Not to discredit these particular examples, but with so many words and languages, some are bound to have similar sound and meaning out of sheer coincidence. An especially striking example is the English ‘much’ (from OE ‘mycel’) vs the Spanish ‘mucho’ (from Latin ‘multum’).

Physicist, quant, & Art Deco advocate |                                        

Moderating /science and /artdeco |     

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Yeah they definitely happen in cases where there are near-coincidences.

The way to think about it is:

For each word in language A there are perhaps 100 valid translations in language B
For each word in language A there are perhaps 100 combinations of native language-B words that sound "close enough" to the language-A word

Sometimes, the intersection of these two sets is nonempty, and then you have an opportunity for an amazing translation.

Phono-semantic matching is so common in Chinese that _not_ doing it for loan words almost seems like a sign of laziness on the part of the person introducing the word.