Me laughing at Germans for calling hospitals “sick houses”.
Me realizing hospitals are called “hurty places” in my native language.
It’s sick house for some other languages too.
It’s not a sick house. It’s a house for sick people.
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. 😘
“Stuff” should be translated as “tool”, IMO.
Or thing.
Either is a better translation than stuff.
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.
It’s not a transliteration, it’s a direct translation. Transliteration is the conversion of one script into another and (Modern) English and German use the same script based on Latin. Transliteration would be дружба - druzhba.
By the way, in many German online communities, it’s a meme to take English expressions and directly translate them and is called Zangendeutsch. Just go to any of the ich_iel communities here and you can see it :)
a language would sound the same when transliterated to another language
Eh, not totally. Some languages have phonemes that are completely absent in other languages, and some phonemes (especially vowels, though sometimes consonants, eg: “r”) are different enough that a transliteration can never do them justice. Although, I guess transliterating into the international phonetic alphabet would do the trick…
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.
German is weird in more ways, namely word ordering
Sie dürfen nicht ein Feuerzeug mit ins Flugzeug nehmen
You’re not allowed to a fire stuff with you in flight stuff bring
But all languages are weird. Here’s some french for you
qu’est-ce que c’est?
I don’t have the knowledge needed to translate this properly but it’s something like “wh’is-at what that is” (its the way they say “what is that”)
And Swedish, my native language
I eftermiddags åt jag jordgubbar. Nu ska jag äta middag.
This after middle day ate i soil old men. Now I’m going to eat middle day. (This afternoon I ate strawberrys. Now I’m going to eat dinner)
Given that Swedish is my native language I’d also like to inform you that the English word “smorgasbord” is completely ridiculous. It’s literally just the Swedish word “smörgåsdsbord” but without å and ö, so it’s pronounced completely wrong. The word smörgås is however also a bit weird, it literally means “butter goose”. So your English word smorgasbord means “butter goose table”. Also window means wind eye, it’s the old Swedish word “vindöga”
No german would ever talk like that. Correct would be “Sie dürfen keine Feuerzeuge mit ins Flugzeug nehmen” (You are not allowed to bring lighters into the aircraft).
I’ll try:
You allowed not one fire thing with into flight thing bring.
That would be: Sie dürfen nicht eins Feuerdings mit in
hineindas Flugdings hinein bringenThe hinein from ‘into’ is optional in German. Better would be:
You may no firegear with in the flightgear take.
飞机 = Flying Machine
打火机 = Fight Fire Machine (wtf lol)
玩具 = Play Device(?)
工具 = Work Device
救护车 = Save-Protect Car/Cart (SPC? SCP? 🤔 Ambulances are an SCP confirmed?!?)
Edit: Also
救命 = Save Life (Much better than “Help”, English is lame)
You forgot
火车 (fire car) = train
手机 (hand machine) = cellphone
JīJī = [Redacted due to NSFW]
(I have no idea what the characters is supposed to look like, I just hear people say it 🤭)
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!
It is connected to both moron and oxygen. The Greek word moros means stupid, so a moron is someone or something stupid, and oxys means something like sharp or pointed. An oxymoron is thus a “pointed stupidity”.
The word oxygen derives from the old, now falsified belief that it is the key element to create an acid. genes means creation and it was named because of that thought that it creates sharp (acidic) stuff.
Thank you very much!
Because it took me way too long: Beender=Terminator
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.
Car is short for carriage.
Specifically a tool, like a Werkzeug for example.
Edit: that’s what I get for commenting after only reading the first panel then, haha.
I love shield-toads! 🐢
What about naked-snails?
Theres one big difference between German and English. German allows you to just take multiple words and pack them into one word. This is a
bugfeature English does not have(or at least not to this extend). That’s also the reason why its sometimes very hard to translate some gean words because you have to split them up and then translate them individually.Witzig, sehr witzig
Ich bedanke mich.
I’ve learned that
Hospital = Krankenhaus = Sick House
Ambulance = Krankenwagen = Sick Wagon
It actually makes sense.
English has “plaything”, which is kinda similar.
Krankenhaus - die Kranken (the sick persons from krank meaning sick) and das Haus (the house). A Krakenhaus could maybe be found at an aquarium as it’s a house of octopuses (release the kraken!). Octopuses are more commonly called Tintenfisch tho, which literally means ink fish.
German… the Language of Love
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
hedge hog
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!
