nave

One sense of "nave" traces back to Latin nāvis ("ship"), likely arriving through a Romance language, and is a doublet of "nef" and "nau." A second, unrelated sense comes from Old English nafu, from Proto-Germanic *nabō, from Proto-Indo-European *h₃nebʰ- ("navel, hub").

The two senses simply ran in parallel rather than evolving from one another: the ship-derived "nave" and the hub-derived "nave" happen to sound identical in English despite having entirely separate roots.

The hub sense connects "nave" to Dutch naaf, German Nabe, and Swedish nav — all descendants of the same Proto-Germanic word for a wheel's center. It's also distantly linked to Latin umbō ("shield boss"), Latvian naba, and Sanskrit nabhya, all rooted in the same ancient word for "navel."