memes @lemmy.world

2mo ago

A language like a set of building blocks.

140 comments

Krankenwagen = sick car = ambulance
Krankenhaus = sick house = hospital
German (as well as most of the germanic family) does word construction really well.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 救護車
  救 --> save/rescue
  護 --> protect
  車 --> car/vehicle
  aka: 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

It’s exactly the same in Thai:
\ ตู้ “dtuu” - Cupboard
\ เย็น “yen” - cool
\ ตู้เย็น “dtuu•yen” - Refrigerator

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?

German is wild. Sometimes its like the spacebar was never invented and you get such beauties as Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaugabenübertragungsgesetz
- Da fehlt ein f. :-)
  
  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.
  
  auFgaben
  Scheisse!
- 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/
- But why separate the parts if it is one word
- 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

English is the funny north German dialect that moved to an island and went mental.
- Lol, It's all the French influence
  
  German syntax, with the "I don't want to pronounce that letter" of French. A wonderful combination.

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.
- I'm all for putting handshoe in english, myself.
  
  I'm pretty sure I've actually said that...
- Or why isn't shoe "futgloven" or something?

Mehrfamilienhaus = more families house / apartment
Why new words when old words good?
- I like new words, like Rucksackriemenquerverbindungsträger (the horizontal connection between the straps of your backpack that makes the backpack magically less heavy when closed)

House - Haus
Animal - Tier
Pet - Haustier
- Similar in Finnish:
  Koti - home
  Eläin - animal
  Kotieläin - pet

Undersea boat is my favorite German word. Why make a new word when you can mash shit together?
- sub - under
  marine - sea
  You and I, we're not so different :)
- I'm personally partial to highwayservicestations for being a compact way to say 2 words as one and shieldfrogs because shieldfrogs are awesome.

If you like this you’ll love Chinese! A language where books were printed with literal blocks of wood!

Yes, and the language works this way too:
电 (diàn) : lightning
脑 (nǎo) : brain
电脑 : computer
- Japanese is also similar
  
  Japanese: コンピューター (Kon pyuu taa) 🗿

Ah yes, the re-frigid-air-inator
- Read it in his voice!

I suspect every language does this to some extent. Some good examples from Japanese:
靴 = shoes 下 = under 靴下 = socks
手 = hand 紙 = paper 手紙 = letter
歯 = teeth 車 = wheel 歯車 = cog / gear
火 = fire 山 = mountain 火山 = volcano
Sadly (?) the Japanese compounds are often only compounds of the symbols, not the spoken words.
- Well 🇩🇪
  Zahn = Tooth
  Rad = Wheel
  Zahnrad = cog 🎉
  
  We took that into Hungarian
  Fog = Tooth
  Kerék = Wheel
  Fogaskerék = Toothywheel = Cog
- Even more than the compound words I really like the kanji that have basically pure pictograph meanings, like mountain pass being "mountain up down" 峠.
  Side note my favorite mnemonic is for the word (hospital) patient, where a person (者) ate too much meat on a stick, and now the problem is in their heart 串 + 心 --> 患者
- well every language except English I guess.
  
  We might not have as many as German or Japanese, but we do have some. Toothbrush, waterwheel, phonebook, stovetop, bookshelf, Headphone, bedspread, newspaper, etc.

Norway has some of the allegedly most unhinged word constructions via "cake". It had the modern meaning of a baked sweet, but also any sorta roundish cooked thing that is not sweet, and the old meaning of "any hard lumped mass".
So we have, in order of descending sanity:
Bløtkake - soft cake, sponge cake
Småkake - small cake, cookie
Kjøttkake - meat cake, ground meat patties
Fiskekake - fish cake, ground fish meat patties
Oljekake - oil cake, lump of mass left after pressing oil out of linseeds
Blodkake - blood cake, lump of dried blood
Morkake - mother cake, placenta
Kukake - cow cake, cow poop
- And the infamous Bukake.
- Kukake
  (≖_≖ )
  
  Kind of funny, in German you could also consider it "Kuhkacke" (literally cow poo). Weird that it's so similar and means the same thing but is presumably etymologically very different.
- English has 'cow patty', which except for still being two words seems not so different from that last one.
- We have the Mutterkuchen (placenta) in German as well.
  But, one German word for shit is Kacke. Coincidence? I think not!
- We have lehmakool (cow cake) in Estonian too and I found it absolutely hilarious as a kid reading some children's book. Might have been one of those Bullerby books by Astrid Lindgren, but I might also remember wrong

English really is the weird one in this. Constructing new words with old ones makes a lot more sense than just stealing the words from other languages and mashing them in without changing much
- All languages borrow, including German. English is not at all weird in this way.
  
  Borrowing itself is normal, yeah, but english tends to go to the extremes with that. Even yoinking words like smörgåsbord as they are

icebox is sorta similar.
- An icebox is Gefrierschrank.
  Follow me for more german words.
  
  Eiskasten is also a (very outdated) one.

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.

Afrikaans:
Vries - Freeze Kas - Cupboard/Closet
Vrieskas -> Freezer
Ys - Ice Kas - Cupboard/Closet
Yskas -> Fridge 🤷
Troetel - Cuddle / Pet (verb) / pamper Dier - Animal
Troeteldier -> Pet animal
Duik - Dive Boot - Boat
Duikboot -> submarine

So like "icebox"?
- Eiskasten, Oida!

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.

Sorry for the you tube link, but it's too relevant: When people speak English but with German grammar.
- Aua

Ich liebe diese handgedrechselten Umlaute 💖

You won't believe how to spell vacuum cleaner in German !
- Dustsucker.
  
  The only thing I own that doesn't suck is my dustsucker.

Mandarin-Chinese:
冰 = ice
箱 = box
冰箱 = ice box (refrigerator/freezer)
or in Cantonese:
雪 = snow
櫃 = cabinet
雪櫃 = snow cabinet (refrigerator/freezer)
usually 上層 "upper level" is used to indicate the freezing part (急凍/雪藏), like where you out ice cream, for example; 下層 "lower level" is used to refer to the non-freezing part, like where you put fruits, for example. Because every fridge we had was designed like that.
Also fun fact: 電腦 means "electric" + " brain" (aka: computer)
飛機 = "flying" + "machine" (aka: airplane)
Feel free to ask questions. I'm bored and wanna see how much I know.
- Ok, so I heard anywhere that there is a Chinese language, where the signs for young and women does not say girl, but chimney. Can you confirm?
  
  The fuck?
  Lol no idk what the hell you got that from.

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!)

Slightly different thing cause this is agglutination but:
Ill/illik: fit/fits
Illet: concerns someone
Illeték: duty(kinda)
Illetéktelen: one without the duty, in english unauthorized(look at "staff only" for why "duty" makes sense)
Illetéktelenek: multiple unauthorized ones
Illetékteleneknek: for the multiple unauthorized ones
Then you can a use it in a sentence "Illetékteleneknek belépni tilos", "Forbidden for unauthorized ones to enter"
- Wow what's the language?
  
  Ahh yeah i kinda forgot to write that. Its hungarian tho this is kind of an extreme case. Most words youd use in a normal sentence has 1 to 3 suffixes.
- Bojler eladó

One of my favorite examples of this is when a coworker from Bosnia asked for some gloves. She knew more German than English, so she asked for handshoes.

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?

Same in Swedish:
Cold - Kyla
Cupboard - Skåp
Fridge - Kylskåp
- Same in Danish (køleskab). And I bet it's the same in Norwegian?
  
  Yeah probably
- So Swedish term for fridges is basically just icebox? My great great aunt would've loved the Swedes.
  
  Coldbox, but yeah
  
  Finnish term still is, jääkaappi.
  Pakastin is just literally a freezer, though

Not fair. Dutch does basicly the same. Yet we rarely get credit. German does sound cooler in most cases.

Every language is. German not having a word for fridge is fine. Compound words are a product of lack of a dedicated wird in a lot of languages.

German must have its own share of disappointing terms.
Pferd comes to mind as an example. I really expected something more metal like horzdraken or comical like hoofenstreider. But no, just a boring Roman loan word.
- That's a common misconception! "Pferd" is called that, because it lives on the ground ("Erde"). If it would live in the air ("Luft"), it would be called "Pfluft".
  /j
- The latin word, for those who are curious, being paraverēdus (additional postal horse, postal horse for special occasions), according to https://www.dwds.de/wb/Pferd
- Simple words are usually those that stayed with a language the longest.
  Hungarian also has a very high percentage of loanwords, and a lot of those very old ancient non-compound non-calque non-loanwords are single syllable.
  Like:
  Horse = Ló Road = Út Bridge = Híd Army = Had Herd of horses = Mén

Yeah sounds cool but do you remember their genders?

but a cold cupboard is the the technology that predates the refrigerator, so how would you know which one people are talking about in German? (j/k)
- Just in case there's someone here who'd like to know: that "cold cupboard" technology that preceded the refrigerator in people's homes is called Eisschrank in German.

140 comments