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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
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 🇩🇪
Zahn = Tooth
Rad = Wheel
Zahnrad = cog 🎉
We took that into Hungarian
Fog = Tooth
Kerék = Wheel
Fogaskerék = Toothywheel = Cog
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
Ah yes, the re-frigid-air-inator
Read it in his voice!
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.
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.
救護車
救 --> save/rescue
護 --> protect
車 --> car/vehicle
aka: Ambulance
An ambulance is a life saving car protecting you, or to abbreviate it, an SCP.
An ambulance is an SCP confirmed.
English is the funny north German dialect that moved to an island and went mental.
Lol, It's all the French influence
German syntax, with the "I don't want to pronounce that letter" of French. A wonderful combination.
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?
The board is still there, but "cupbox" might be more accurate. 🤔️
Ich liebe diese handgedrechselten Umlaute 💖
Mehrfamilienhaus = more families house / apartment
Why new words when old words good?
I like new words, like Rucksackriemenquerverbindungsträger (the horizontal connection between the straps of your backpack that makes the backpack magically less heavy when closed)
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
It’s exactly the same in Thai:
ตู้ “dtuu” - Cupboard
เย็น “yen” - cool
ตู้เย็น “dtuu•yen” - Refrigerator
Sorry for the you tube link, but it's too relevant: When people speak English but with German grammar.
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.
German is wild. Sometimes its like the spacebar was never invented and you get such beauties as Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaugabenübertragungsgesetz
Da fehlt ein f. :-)
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.
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/
Mandarin-Chinese:
冰 = ice
箱 = box
冰箱 = ice box (refrigerator/freezer)
or in Cantonese:
雪 = snow
櫃 = cabinet
雪櫃 = snow cabinet (refrigerator/freezer)
usually 上層 "upper level" is used to indicate the freezing part (急凍/雪藏), like where you out ice cream, for example; 下層 "lower level" is used to refer to the non-freezing part, like where you put fruits, for example. Because every fridge we had was designed like that.
Also fun fact: 電腦 means "electric" + " brain" (aka: computer)
飛機 = "flying" + "machine" (aka: airplane)
Feel free to ask questions. I'm bored and wanna see how much I know.
Now do Gloves = Handschuhe
Hand Shoes!
Seehund always cracks me up. It's the perfect name.
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.
Undersea boat is my favorite German word. Why make a new word when you can mash shit together?
sub - under
marine - sea
You and I, we're not so different :)
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
Yeah sounds cool but do you remember their genders?
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
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:
And the infamous Bukake.