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
Sorry for the you tube link, but it’s too relevant: When people speak English but with German grammar.
Aua
Now do Gloves = Handschuhe — Hand Shoes!
Seehund always cracks me up. It’s the perfect name.
Slug = Nacktschnecke – naked snail.
What would snail be if they had named slugs first? “Shellslug?”
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
You won’t believe how to spell vacuum cleaner in German !
Dustsucker.
The only thing I own that doesn’t suck is my dustsucker.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or for the example in the actual original post “ice box.”
Well 🇩🇪 Zahn = Tooth Rad = Wheel Zahnrad = cog 🎉
We took that into Hungarian
Fog = Tooth
Kerék = Wheel
Fogaskerék = Toothywheel = CogWell, is a cog actually a toothy wheel for everybody but the English language?
It’s exactly the same in Thai:
ตู้ “dtuu” - Cupboard
เย็น “yen” - cool
ตู้เย็น “dtuu•yen” - RefrigeratorKrankenwagen = 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.
Krankenhandy
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.
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.
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.
In swiss german it still is “Spital”.
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.
German is wild. Sometimes its like the spacebar was never invented and you get such beauties as Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaugabenübertragungsgesetz
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
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
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.
