Mispronouncing mojibake and bakemoji
(I originally posted this as a comment on a Facebook thread of mine, but thought it was worth reposting as a Words & Stuff post.)
The first time I saw the word mojibake, I didn’t recognize it as Japanese, so I pronounced it (to myself) as rhyming with cake.
Just now, I did a search for bakemoji to see if that meant the same thing, and I was puzzled by the first several search results until I realized that people (presumably Anglophones) were portmanteauing bake-as-in-baking + emoji, and using bakemoji to mean “making cupcakes that look like common emoji.”
So I’ve now gotten the pronunciation of bake wrong twice, once in each direction. :)
I wonder if there’s a word for words in two or more languages that can be written to look the same but have totally different meanings and pronunciations.
(Kat noted in response that there are a lot of Japanese words that are in that category.)