Good call. According to wiki, the French escale is descended from the Latin scala (ladder)

EDIT: I misread. The modern French word escale (port of call) descended from the Latin scala (ladder), but the similar Old French word escale/eschale (hard skin covering) came from the Old High German scala (similar meaning). BUT, the Norse skala (measuring device) mentioned in the meme DID descend from the Latin scala (ladder)!

These comments are the reason why I like Lemmy / the Fediverse so much. Thank you!

Now what about a music scale?

It's the fish scale meaning. If I could post all of the OED stuff here I would. The sense of flaking from a husk or rind is from the 1450s - onion skin is referenced in this sense. Oxide films like rust date in the 1520s, and scale for tooth tartar is from the 1590s.

idk why'd anyone hate English tbh, perfect lingua franca precisely due to its grammatic simplicity and flexibility

But bank does have at least 2 etymologies.

This is an example. Bank can be the money bank or a bank of a river.

Hmm, the only time I learned about false cognates was when learning high school Spanish, so I assumed it meant two words that sound similar in different languages but have different meanings, rather than homonyms in the same language.

Example: embarrassed and embarazado

Looking the above example up for spelling, I see it's called a false friend, and perhaps I misunderstood false cognate (from here https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#false_cognate ) :

false cognate
A word in a language that bears a phonetic and semantic resemblance to a word in another or the same language but is not etymologically related to it and thus not a true cognate. Examples include English day/Portuguese dia, German Feuer/French feu (both meaning "fire"), Malay dua/Sanskrit द्व (dva) (both meaning "two"), and English dog/Mbabaram dog. Compare false friend.

false friend
A word in a language that bears a phonetic resemblance to a word in another language, often because of a common etymology, but has a different meaning. Examples include English parent/Portuguese parente (“relative”) and English embarrassed/Spanish embarazada (“pregnant”). Compare false cognate.