Honey
Honey has an interesting distribution of etymological roots across languages. Serbian med, or мед, is not etymologically connected to Portuguese mel, despite their apparent similarity, but it is distantly related to Turkish bal. We might expect med to relate to other Slavic terms such as Polish miód, and it is also connected to the adjacent Hungarian méz and, farther away, Komi ма (ma). These languages ultimately derive from the Proto–Indo-European root medʰu ‘honey’.
By contrast, Portuguese mel is connected not only to other Romance languages—such as Romanian miere—but also to Albanian mjaltë, Greek μέλῐ (mélĭ), Armenian մեղր (meġr), and Irish mil. The origin here goes back to another Proto–Indo-European mel-ty.
A third group traces back to a different Indo-European root, *kn̥h₂ónks. Its main descendant in Proto-Germanic is hunangō, which yields English honey and also related Germanic words such as Swedish honung and German Honig. We should also include one non-Germanic language in this third group: Finnish hunaja, which borrowed the word via Swedish.
