There is a table of examples in the link. Some I saw include:
Desert
- desert Latin dēserō (“to abandon”) << ultimately PIE **seh₁- (“to sow”)
- Ancient Egyptian: Deshret (refers to the land not flooded by the Nile) from dšr (red)
Shark
- shark Middle English shark from uncertain origin
- Chinese 鲨 (shā) Named as its crude skin similar to sand (沙 (shā))
Kayak
- Inuktitut ᖃᔭᖅ (kayak) Proto-Eskimo *qyaq
- Turkish kayık (‘small boat’)[17] Old Turkic kayguk << Proto-Turkic kay- (“to slide, to turn”)
A lot of these could be TIL posts of their own.
I also wonder if some of these are actually false cognates, or if there is a much earlier common origin with false associations that came afterwards
Common but old origin tends to make words diverge over time. Compare for example:
All those eight are true cognates, they’re all from Proto-Indo-European *pénkʷe. But if you look only at the modern stuff, those four look nothing like each other - and yet their [near-]ancestors (the other four) resemble each other a bit better, Latin and Proto-Celtic for example used almost the same word.
They also get even more similar if you know a few common sound changes, like:
In the meantime, false cognates - like the ones mentioned by the OP - are often similar now, but once you dig into their past they look less and less like each other, the opposite of the above.
They also often rely on affixes that we know to be unrelated. For example, let’s dig a bit into the first pair, desert/deshret:
trennbarephrasal verbs like ⟨part away⟩, ⟨explain away⟩, ⟨go away⟩Suddenly our comparison isn’t even between ⟨desert⟩ and ⟨deshret⟩, but rather between /seɾo:/ and /ˈtʼaʃɾa/. They… don’t look similar at all.
* see here for the word in hieroglyphs.
Other bits of info:
Very cool, thank you for the detailed breakdown that was helpful!