Recently, a German expert living in an English-speaking country did it again and talked about “Tarife”, when he actually meant “Zölle”. Typical false friend, because he had the English word “tariffs” in mind.
Conversely, all interpreters who regularly interpret for works councils and trade unions know that ”tariff” must never be used in English when referring to collective wage agreements – even though the German word for them is “Tarifverträge”.
How is it that this word has developed so differently? The term “tariffs” originally comes from Arabic. From there, the word first entered Italian as “tariffa” to then conquer almost all European languages – albeit with different meanings.
The German word “Zoll”, on the other hand, comes from the Greek, where teloneum referred to a customs house. It then found its way into English as “toll”, albeit with a slightly different meaning. And came back to Germany via the English language in the form of the – in my opinion somewhat unfortunate – company name “Toll Collect” for the body that collects the truck toll in Germany.