I’mma be honest, English has no business making fun of any other language. English is not a language, it’s three languages standing on eachother’s shoulders in a trenchcoat.
Heh. In this case I am making fun of my own language, though.
Ich mag es.
Danke, wenigstens einer. 😘
Me laughing at Germans for calling hospitals “sick houses”.
Me realizing hospitals are called “hurty places” in my native language.
It’s not a sick house. It’s a house for sick people.
It’s sick house for some other languages too.
Isn’t English the amalgamation of like 5 different languages and if everything were broken down like this, English would sound just as ridiculous?
I think every language probably sounds silly if transliterated into another language
You’ve clearly never heard of Torpenhow Hill, which translating all to English, means Hill Hill Hill Hill.
Coincidentally, I just watched a video on that sort of thing the other day that was pretty neat: Anglish: English without the ‘foreign’ bits
I’ve loved Anglish for a long time, but my favorite example is Uncleftish Beholding a scientific paper written in Anglish. “Stuff” turns out to be a pretty logical way to explain shit.
The Anglo-Saxons loved compound words. The vocabulary of Old English (and just before that) was very small, so putting words together was necessary for building more complex concepts.
English, a Germanic tongue carried into Britain by the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians, has been influenced by:
- Celtic languages
- A tiny bit of Pictish
- Old Norse
- Latin
- Greek
- Norman Old French (a dialect somewhat distinct from the rest of Frankia)
- Plenty of other things
My favorite English compound word is bookkeeper. 3 consecutive double letters.
One Word you mentioned showed nicely what you missed here: Plain
Originally it was called an aeroplane. This could be translated with “flat thing in the air”. Which is exactly as ridiculous as your other examples in German. The difference is that Germans don’t mind complicated long words where English does so they just drop the part they don’t like.
Oh Germans do drop parts they don’t like. For example, they drop the Gute- from Gutemorgen.
Guten Morgen ist ein Oxymoron!
Oxymoron is a funny word. Like a moron, but now improved with active oxygen for stronger cleaning!
I would argue that the correct translation of Zeug is more like “thing”. Wagen would be “car” in the context of the cartoon. But then it wouldn’t sound absurd and their lowball attempt at humor wouldn’t work.
the thing about compound words is that they become a new word and people usually don’t think about them by breaking them up so they don’t sound ridiculous. if another language has a dedicated word for it, comparing them with the direct translation of the broken up compound word makes a funny comparison.
if you’d like to break up some English compound words to see how they might sound weird or basic in other languages here are some examples:
- arm chair
- arm pit
- blue print
- cup cake
- dead line
- eye lash
- fire fighter
- fire man
- fire works
- home sick
- horse shoe
- lip stick
- make up
- news paper
- pass word
- pine apple
- pot hole
- work place
Let’s see some of them are their own words in our language. Blueprint is similar with it being combined from 2 words. Firework (fire thrower) and homesick (home sad) and newspaper (time write) are in the same boat. Pothole and workplace are 2 word phrases however. Road hole and working place.
I’m sure you can find a lot of parallels in Europe since English shares a lot with Germanic and Latin languages but what I mean is any language could easily have a single dedicated word for it and these would relatively sound funny.
for example you could imagine a language having “extinguisher” as a job title, which makes sense, but then you’d say “in English they call extinguishers ‘people who fight fire’ like they’re fucking boxing isn’t that funny”
but also I don’t know maybe it’s because I’m fascinated by language I don’t actually think it’s funny. I think sick people house makes a lot of sense. much more than hospital to be honest, which means guest house, which is more appropriate for a hotel, which shares etymology with hospital!
I love shield-toads! 🐢
What about naked-snails?
