Same words interpreted as different meanings in different languages [closed]

• Single words in the same language can have more than one meaning ie polysemy. For example 'post' has a lot of distinct meanings in English.

• Single words can appear in two different languages and have the same meaning by coincidence ('bad' in English and Hindi) or by borrowing ('alcohol' in English and Arabic) or by having a common ancestor language (hand in English and German).

• Single words can appear in two different languages with different meanings. They can be close but non-identical meanings ie false friends or it can be a coincidence. I don't think there's a special term for this beyond 'coincidence'. The English word 'gift' when in German 'Gift' means poison. Another example is:

The word 'leer' means:

• English - to glance at in a menacing manner
• German - empty (not full)
• Spanish - to read

If you look at some words in Wiktionary, which collects word meanings for a string for -all- languages that use that word, there are many with more than one language.

So, yes, the written words can be same in more than one language having different meanings.

One could conceivably have a sentence in one language that could be very very similar in another language (English Frisian)

Frisian: Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.

English: Butter, bread, and green cheese is good English and good Fries

Also a sentence could mean something entirely different but the longer the sentence the more difficult it would be (that sounds like a very difficult puzzle).

The way that Google translate does language detection is (to over simplify considerably) by probabilities of appearance and co-occurrence (probably using the specific technique of Naive Bayes). If the collection of words in the written phrase are mostly from one language, it figures that language is the one intended. If you put in words from different languages, the language detection will be difficult (if not impossible) for machine or human.