English is the funny north German dialect that moved to an island and went mental.
Lol, It’s all the French influence
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
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.
Mehrfamilienhaus = more families house / apartment
Why new words when old words good?
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
Not fair. Dutch does basicly the same. Yet we rarely get credit. German does sound cooler in most cases.
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
House - Haus
Animal - Tier
Pet - Haustier
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?
And if that board rots away and is gradually replaced, at what point does it cease to be the original board?
The board is still there, but “cupbox” might be more accurate. 🤔️
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”
Bojler eladó
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.
Undersea boat is my favorite German word. Why make a new word when you can mash shit together?
sub - under
marine - seaYou 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.
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.
English has ‘cow patty’, which except for still being two words seems not so different from that last one.
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.
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
We have the Mutterkuchen (placenta) in German as well.
But, one German word for shit is Kacke. Coincidence? I think not!
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.
Or why isn’t shoe “futgloven” or something?
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.
Oh no, Klaus will pick me up with his Flurfördergerät.
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.
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.
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.
That’s why “hospitable” isn’t anything you expect the average hospital to be.
In swiss german it still is “Spital”.
Krankenhandy
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.
It’s exactly the same in Thai:
ตู้ “dtuu” - Cupboard
เย็น “yen” - cool
ตู้เย็น “dtuu•yen” - Refrigerator
