On Sun, May 21, 2017 at 5:16 PM, Ian Zimmerman itz@primate.net wrote:
On 2017-05-20 18:07, Chris Kerr wrote:
Yes, 'sensible', like 'actually' and 'eventually', is a "false friend" whose meaning in English is different from that in just about every other European language (but the other languages are consistent with each other e.g. 'sensible' in French and 'sensibel' in German have the same meaning), which sometimes leads to confusion. Even more confusingly, 'insensible' is not the opposite of 'sensible' but rather means either 'imperceptible' or 'unconscious'.
I have mused about this myself. The most curious thing is that English is not even consistent with itself here. Think about the title of a famous enlightenment era novel. The meaning of the nouns is precisely inverted from the adjectives.
Inflammable means flammable? What a country!