Zug and anzug however…
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.
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.
House - Haus
Animal - Tier
Pet - Haustier
Similar in Finnish:
Koti - home
Eläin - animal
Kotieläin - pet
Removed by mod
You might like Turkish, iirc it does the German thing but on steroids
English is similar: shoebox, snowflake, raincoat
Driveway, parkway
Taxiway, runway
Where you park on the driveway and drive on the parkway.
Bot Account
Why do you say that? Looks normal to me.
Having seen an absolute gob of these comments, I’m inclined to agree. They all read largely the same way, there’s an awful lot of comments for being a 1 day account (easily rivaling some of the most prolific humans we’ve had), some of them make very little sense, and they are all top level with very very very few replies to anyone.
2h old.
Yeah, there was another account, cosmicpancake, doing the same thing earlier in the day. I didn’t realize they were not the same account, so I overestimated the age even tho the account page said it was an hour old when I looked at it. Figured it was a federation bug.
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)
deleted by creator
Krankenwagen = sick car = ambulance
Krankenhaus = sick house = hospital
German (as well as most of the germanic family) does word construction really well.
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
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 swiss german it still is “Spital”.
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.
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.
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
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.
Sorry for the you tube link, but it’s too relevant: When people speak English but with German grammar.
Aua
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
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 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.
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?
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
Robot - Das 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!)
You won’t believe how to spell vacuum cleaner in German !
Dustsucker.
The only thing I own that doesn’t suck is my dustsucker.
Same in Swedish:
Cold - Kyla
Cupboard - Skåp
Fridge - Kylskåp
So Swedish term for fridges is basically just icebox? My great great aunt would’ve loved the Swedes.
Finnish term still is, jääkaappi.
Pakastin is just literally a freezer, though
That’s too much a.
What do you mean? Ä and a are completely different letters
Coldbox, but yeah
I was moreso trying to make a joke on the fact that the Swedish word is very similar to the archaic English term.
I see! I didn’t know that
I don’t think most people under the age of 80 know, but I grew up around old bastards and am into antiques so it just kinda stuck out to me.
Have a rather fancy ice box from the 1890s that would’ve used metal shelves you put ice between which would then cool and keep an insulated cubbard chilled refrigerating the food within, between that and the fact it had a hose to drain the cold water which gather in a lower sub area as the ice melted it’d be about as good as a modern ice chest though you’d have to fill it with new ice every morning. Though it’s currently being used for clothes storage.
Same in Danish (køleskab). And I bet it’s the same in Norwegian?
Yeah probably
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
English does have an above-average percentage of loanwords, but not the highest. Armenian and Romani are over 90% borrowings, for example.
Also, note that “smorgasbord” has undergone significant phonological adaptation in its borrowing to fit English’s phonotactics - it’s definitely not borrowed as-is.
Undersea boat is my favorite German word. Why make a new word when you can mash shit together?
I’m personally partial to highwayservicestations for being a compact way to say 2 words as one and shieldfrogs because shieldfrogs are awesome.
sub - under
marine - seaYou and I, we’re not so different :)
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.
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
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 the Mutterkuchen (placenta) in German as well.
But, one German word for shit is Kacke. Coincidence? I think not!
English has ‘cow patty’, which except for still being two words seems not so different from that last one.
And the infamous Bukake.
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
