1y ago

Please check you kids' Halloween candy, everyone

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What counts as banned? Mien kalf?
- for some reason, that book is not typically targeted by right wing book bans.
  
  Because they directly reference it for their politics
  
  Moms for liberty needs it to pull quotes from for the newsletter
- I guess you mean "Mein Kampf"? And no, the people who are into banning books are very much OK with that one.
  
  That one and the far right book "The Turner Diaries" are banned in serial forms.
- Either censored by the government or self-censored by the library/institution as the case may be. It's truly a process as old as writing itself.
  In the case of kids specifically I would probably limit it to age appropriate reading material, which Hitler's angry prison manifesto really isn't...
  That being said there are a few hard hitting children's books about the holocaust, and those actually are on banned books lists.
- Mien Kalf can only be read as 'my calf' or a woman with the first name Mien and last name Kalf in Dutch. Mien being pronounced like 'mean'.
  Mein is pronounced to rhyme with nine. The 'ei' only being correctly pronounced in American when saying Einstein, other -steins get mispronounced to rhyme with 'lean' (Weiner as Weener instead of whiner fi).
  So we've got 'mein', to rhyme with nine, and Kampf, which might look like it's out of your comfort zone, but it's pronounced like comfort without the -ort.
  Didn't intend for this to become a German pronunciation lesson using dictatorial literature, but there we are..
  
  If Kampf is pronounced "comf" does that mean the English words, "comfy" or "comfortable" come from the German word for "struggle"?
  
  Nah, not at all.
  To be fair, it only really works with the american accent, where the 'o' in comfortable gets pronaunced a bit like an a. In British english it leans more to 'u'.
  Comfortable is from latin 'to strengthen or to help'. Com (cum) Force (forte) (maybe the british pronounciation is more correct because of the latin 'cum' :).
  German Kampf is related to camp, which would mean a military kamp, but also a battle. It gets translated to 'struggle' in English, but 'My Battle' or 'My Fight' would be more correct, albeit less litererary pleasing.
  
  Remember to always provide context when describing pronunciation in English. The letter u may be realised /jʉw/ ("use"), /ʉw/ ("rule"), /ɵ/ ("put") and /ʌ/ ("cut"), of which only the last one is a valid approximation.
  
  Ah, okay. I was wondering if it was a silly reason like, "it's a struggle to do anything when you're comfy" or something like that.
  
  As a rule, when speculating etymological relations, always look at the spelling rather than the pronunciation, since the latter tends to change a lot more quickly. English, of course, is an extreme case of this; during the Great Vowel Shift spellings stayed much the same while most vowels changed to the point of becoming unrecognisable. This is the main reason why English spelling makes no sense.

96 comments