How many other languages have anomalies similar to or the same as the above?
You obviously have never studied the language with the largest number of speakers on this planet: Chinese. It makes English look orderly. Chinese words are coined so that juxtaposition of components is not identical to more than three or four other words that can be more-or-less easily distinguished.
(Yes, Chinese is actually several different languages that are not mutually intelligible--Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghai, Fujou, etc. But they all use the same words, pronounced differently, and the same grammar and syntax, with about 97% consistency. The reason for this is that the written language is not phonetic. It brings everyone together in vocabulary and grammar, as they continue to diverge phonetically. In Mandarin, "five" is pronounced "wu," whereas in Cantonese it's pronounced "ng.")
The main reason for the anomalies you present is that, perhaps more than any other major language, English is not strongly descended from one primary ancestor. The Germanic invaders (the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, etc.) who conquered the original Celtic inhabitants of Britannia brought Old High German with them, which became known as Anglisc and ultimately English. But only a few centuries later, the Normans conquered the Anglo-Saxons and brought their language with them.
Medieval French soon became the official language of government, commerce, diplomacy, scholarship and the church. The common folk continued to speak their Germanic language, but it absorbed hundreds of French words. In order for this to succeed, the language underwent phonetic realignment that allowed the Germanic and Latin words to be pronounced by the same people, and it also underwent a tremendous simplification of grammar, because the Germanic and French suffixes for gender, number, verb tense and other inflections were not compatible.
The result is what you see and, in many cases, what you even offered as examples. There are many word-pairs in English with utterly different meanings, because one is of Germanic origin and the other of French.
But it didn't stop there. As English became the language of scholarship in recent centuries, it has assimilated, wholesale, entire paradigms of Latin and Greek words in science and other realms of study. It wouldn't be difficult to craft a sentence in which every important word is derived from a different language. And of course it's inevitable that some of these words would have homonyms derived from yet another language.
After all, we've got words from Chinese (coolie), Japanese (shogun), Hindi (khaki), Korean (gook--yes ugly slang is quickly adopted, although "gook" is simply the word for "Korean"), Russian (troika), Spanish (buckaroo-from vaquero), Native Australian (didgeridoo), Native American (teepee, igloo), and African languages (banjo).
The word "OK" has fairly respectable pedigrees in at least three languages: English, Scots Gaelic and Wolof (an African language).
