Now do Gloves = Handschuhe — Hand Shoes!
Slug = Nacktschnecke – naked snail.
What would snail be if they had named slugs first? “Shellslug?”
Seehund always cracks me up. It’s the perfect name.
English is so pathetic. A Cupboard is not a board and it’s not just for cups. Then they add insult to injury by just failing to coin the word chillgrill.
Though, to be fair, following the logic of the word cupboard, a fridge should be a cheesegrill. That’s not something anyone could want. Goddammit English.
House - Haus
Animal - Tier
Pet - Haustier
Similar in Finnish:
Koti - home
Eläin - animal
Kotieläin - pet
icebox is sorta similar.
An icebox is Gefrierschrank.
Follow me for more german words.Eiskasten is also a (very outdated) one.
It’s exactly the same in Thai:
ตู้ “dtuu” - Cupboard
เย็น “yen” - cool
ตู้เย็น “dtuu•yen” - RefrigeratorGerman is wild. Sometimes its like the spacebar was never invented and you get such beauties as Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaugabenübertragungsgesetz
But why separate the parts if it is one word
Da fehlt ein f. :-)
auFgaben
Scheisse!
With the missing f it’s now a law about the transfer of talents of meadows used for the supervision of the labeling of beef.
I’m not sure why they’re supervising that on a meadow but the meadow is clearly very talented.
lemmygold.png
Some languages don’t even have spaces. Writing systems are irrelevant formality and not exceptional at all. I prefer the lack of space for it clearly shows that that’s a compound word
After the invention of the spacebar, it took another three hundred years to invent the period.
https://www.matthiasbrinkmann.de/wordpress/2016/07/what-is-the-longest-sentence-in-kant/
Krankenwagen = sick car = ambulance
Krankenhaus = sick house = hospital
German (as well as most of the germanic family) does word construction really well.
Danish uses “hospital” as a word, but they also have “sygehus” (house of the sick).
Apparently, English also has “sickhouse”: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sickhouse#English
Germany has Hospital as well. But it sounds archaic.
If I recall correctly hospitals were just the only “hotels” sick people could afford. So that’s where nuns would go to care for them. So more sick people would come because they would get good care there. Until they made the hospitals the official house where they care for sick people.
In Switzerland, the word Spital is in use instead of Krankenhaus
That’s why “hospitable” isn’t anything you expect the average hospital to be.
In swiss german it still is “Spital”.
While that may be an element it also comes from the Knights Hospitallers who would set up rest stops for pilgrims. The thing is pilgrims would often get sick and have to be taken care of by the Hospitallers, which also blends into what you’re talking about.
That’s probably the full story. I couldn’t remember it all.
Help I’m kranken, someone call a krankenwagon to take me to the krankenhaus before I krank again
Entschuldigung, but the Krankenwagen is krank and must be taken to the Wagenkrankenhaus in the Krankerwagenkrankenwagen.
We will send the Krankenpfleger Klaus and his Krankenschwester Klara to pick you up in a Rollstuhl.
Oh no, Klaus will pick me up with his Flurfördergerät.
救護車
救 --> save/rescue
護 --> protect
車 --> car/vehicleaka: Ambulance
An ambulance is a life saving car protecting you, or to abbreviate it, an SCP.
An ambulance is an SCP confirmed.
Interesting what languages go with, as Japanese keeps the save part but drops the protect in favor of hurry/emergency, so it’s the “hurry up and save you car” 救急車
Even ambulance itself comes from the French phrase walking hospital, and then the hospital part got dropped. We still retain the word ambulant to mean moving in English
How about sick move?
Kranke Bewegung, but we don’t say it in that context, not even for Parkinson patients who literally got sick moves.
The “en” part puts “krank” in genitive though, so “car of the sick” or “sick’s car” would be a more accurate translation. The car is not sick after all.
Krankenhandy
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All languages borrow, including German. English is not at all weird in this way.
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English does have an above-average percentage of loanwords, but not the highest. Armenian and Romani are over 90% borrowings, for example.
Also, note that “smorgasbord” has undergone significant phonological adaptation in its borrowing to fit English’s phonotactics - it’s definitely not borrowed as-is.
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Yeah sounds cool but do you remember their genders?
Zug and anzug however…
Zug is the noun to “ziehen”. Like the Lokomotive pulls the wagons and “anziehen” is the German verb for “to dress” and in that case you can “interpret” again a “pull” (like in pullover) and the noun to “anziehen” is “Anzug”.
But yes it typically makes at least some sense but sometimes it’s pretty abstract or doesn’t work very well.
There’s a lot of things you can ziehen though:
Anziehen, ausziehen, umziehen, wegziehen, verziehen, aufziehen, abziehen, erziehen, beziehen and probably a couple more I forgot.
Also, Bezug and Beziehung are two different words that can mean the same but usually don’t.
There’s a lot of things you can ziehen though
Can I ziehen your wife?
In Hungarian, to pull a woman is in fact slang meaning to have sex with her.
Sorry for the you tube link, but it’s too relevant: When people speak English but with German grammar.
Aua
Really, nobody is going to point out that “cupboard” ? “cup” + “board”?
The issue that makes it less intuitive is the “board” part. I’d assume a “cupboard” used to be a shelf, a board for putting cups on, but it evolved to have wooden walls around it so is it really a “board” anymore?
The board is still there, but “cupbox” might be more accurate. 🤔️
And if that board rots away and is gradually replaced, at what point does it cease to be the original board?
The cupboard of Theseus
Robot - Der Bipenböpenmann
It’s >der< Bipenböpenmann, please. “Mann” is grammatically masculine, so all composite words of it are, too.
This is called the “Right Hand Head Rule”; that is, the rightmost member of a compound in languages like English and German (almost) always acts as the “head”, the member that determines the grammatical information of the entire compound.
There are also many languages, such as Hebrew, with a Left Hand Head Rule, in which the leftmost member is the head. (Also Thai, as seen in a comment above!)
I never get why glove is handschuh rather than handsocke.
Because Socken are the inner layer whereas Handschuhe, like Schuhe, are the outer (or only) layer.
That makes sense. The bit that threw me off with it is that shoes tend to be pretty solid and inflexible where as gloves tend not to be, hence thinking it would make more sense to be socks.
Or why isn’t shoe “futgloven” or something?
I’m all for putting handshoe in english, myself.
I’m pretty sure I’ve actually said that…
Undersea boat is my favorite German word. Why make a new word when you can mash shit together?
I’m personally partial to highwayservicestations for being a compact way to say 2 words as one and shieldfrogs because shieldfrogs are awesome.
sub - under
marine - seaYou and I, we’re not so different :)
