What is awesome in German?

;)

It's a plastic distributor cap, I had to learn and correctly pronounce the names of the numerous parts I bought to maintain my $200 VW and make it pass the Army's version of the strict TUV inspection. Some aren't so obvious, headlights are "shine throwers", plugs are "spark candles", hex nuts are "mothers", especially the rusted ones.

Earlier today I downloaded the instructions for a Jotul wood stove, with English and Norwegian in parallel down the page but clearly not literally translated. Knowing some German gave me at least a third of the Norsk words, enough to figure out most of it. For example pakninger looks like Packungen, sealing gaskets.

jsw

y. ;)

Norwegian "lyskaster", "lys" =3D "light", "kaste" =3D "throw"

Norw. "tennplugg", "tenn" =3D "ignite"

"Mutter" in Norwegian. There ought to be some interesting etymology here.

Correct.

If you know both German and English, you should be able to come a long way understanding written Norwegian and Danish, and presumably also Swedish. The grammar is a simplified version of the German grammar, words are concatenated in much the same way as in German, and the vocabulary is partially Germanic, with increasing amounts of anglicisms.

One trap to be aware of, though, is Norw. "=F8l" vs German "=F6l". The former means "beer", the latter "oil".

Rune

Also Dutch, after learning the voiced-unvoiced shifts etc. I can't really make much sense of Swedish and Finnish is of course impossible.

The US tv show "Buffy" did a comedy cheating-husband scene in supposedly authentic Old Norse from 900AD that was a parody of bad foreign films. (The show was basically the ex-Ellen and Roseanne writers' playground for any rude, wacky humor they felt like and the network either tolerated or didn't understand, such as making bad puns in Latin)

The dialog wasn't in the on-line script copy and the subtitles were intentionally awful, but to me some of the words were recognizably Germanic and others sounded like Russian.

jsw

I discovered this while in Sweden, and found it quite amusing. My pleasant but un-researched theory is that the Vikings called beer "oil" as a barroom joke, and over the centuries the joke became the standard.

So the Swedes had to invent a term for oil: olja.

Joe Gwinn

Right. While at university, I read an article on the wolverine (Gulo gulo) in Swedish in a volume on wildlife biology published by the Swedish Hunter's Association using my knowledge of (southern) German and English. I found that I have to imagine how the words would sound when spoken. Meanwhile I studied some Swedish and can read Swedish newspapers at a somewhat slow pace and think Swedish is much closer to German than to English. Knowledge of English is useful because other than the southern and middle German dialects from which Hochdeutsch mostly evolved (``hoch'' originally refered to height above sea level), Swedisch and English did not take part in the second sound shift.

(And to me Swedish and Norwegian seem similar enough that I avoid reading the second as not to mess them, except for articles that are of special interest to me.)

I guess grammar is the other way round. German dialects, that still exist today (and may be spoken by young people who came e.g. from the Lebanon with their parents) reflect the languages of the Germanic tribes more than 1000 years ago and construct sentences much simpler than Hochdeutsch. Hochdeutsch has evolved a lot as the language of bureaucrats of whom were plenty as there were hundreds of local governments. Those guys tend to demonstrate their importance by using a special language, nouns instead of verbs, etc.

Written Swedish has stayed much closer to the daily language of common people. (Ah, and I remember an article by a Swedish ``språkvårdare'' who writes that they have a hard time to translate the EU bureaucrats into comprehensible Swedish.)

What I find remarkable is the germanic (miss)habit of concatenating nouns. On the one side this seems to make it especially easy in German to formulate nonsense that looks meaningful to an uncritical reader/hearer. This is used a lot in advertising and politics. You encounter things like ``Wohnwelt''. ``Wohnen'' means living/dwelling and ``Welt'' means world. The ordinary German will ``feel something'' when he hears ``Wohnwelt'' and this is exploited by the advertiser to address him. Another rather new concatenation, used a lot as a political club, is ``Erinnerungskultur''. On the other side it is especially easy in German to introduce new terms in science by naming an abstraction through a concatenation of nouns that hint at the contents of the abstraction.

Finally, we have already seen a funny concatenation within the current thread: ``Katzenjammer''. Resolving it into the two words will not lead to the meaning which is hangover or, in a wider sense, when someone feels bad and complains though this is the consequence of something that he originally welcomed and where the consequence should have been obvious. I thought a little over that strange expression and it quicly occured to me that the usual translation of hangover is ``Kater''. Now that word means also (in the first place) a male cat! And there is also ``Muskelkater'' meaning delayed onset muscle soreness.

But phonetically ``Kater'' is close to greek ``katharsis'' and there is a German Wikipedia artikel saying the word ``Kater'' started to be used in the 19-th century by university students to describe their state after an evening of drinking.

Making ``Katzenjammer'' from ``Kater'' was then a straightforward ``Verballhornung'' (cacography). Lang lebe die deutsche Sprache!

ied

German correct grammar is definately more complicted than the Scandinavian grammars. The Scandinavian grammars sort nouns in genuses, masculine, feminine, and neutral, and use grammar rules accordingly.

But unlike German, the Scandinavian languages has no mechanism to indicate dative, accusative and the likes. There are still traces of such forms, at least in certain Norwegian dialects, but the main languages have long since lost them.

''

Sure. Language equals expression. Different languages invite different expressions. I can write phrases in both Norwegian and English I would never dream of saying orally (I am talking about *phrasing*, not contents), simply because written and spoken languages are different.

If you have seen the movie "lock, stock and two smoking barrels" you know what I mean. The dialogue in that film might look good in text, but just sounds awkward, construed and stylized in the flesh.

I would have guessed "Katze" =3D "cat". In that case, "katzenjammer" means something like "squealing sounds made by cats".

But I have got burned on etymological speculations in the past.

Rune

Translations can be much harder when the phrase is from literature. Referring again to the Moscow-Washington Hot Line article I've been reading, they used "Horses, people" from Lermontov's poem "Borodino" (a Napoleonic battle) to describe a chaotic political situation. Luckily it was only a training exercise, that one confounded the translators for a while.

The call sign of one of the Soviets in the KAL007 incident was "Trikotazh" To me it suggests the French word for knitting, or perhaps his home-made sweater. I asked an Air Force Russian translator about it and he was stumped.

Lermontov was originally Learmont, a Scottish refugee from some political mishmash.

jsw

...

In New York at least, katzenjammer includes "noisy hubbub" among its meanings. "Yammer" means lament; wail; shriek. Perhaps

Jerry

Well, sometimes "well-oiled" means "quite drunk." ;-)

Cheers! Rich

So, what's the derivation of "The Katzenjammer Kids?"

;-) Rich

But then the reference gets moved to another language - English. I grew up with a comic strip titled "Katzenjammer kids" q.v.

Evidently it was created by a German immigrant. Was title a joke referring to a hangover or to a squealing cat?

Yikes! I'm 60 freakin' years old, and I swear, as Goddess is my witness, that this is the first time in my life I realized that this refers to a gun! All my life, I've assumed that it had something to do with shipping, meaning "a full load of cargo."

"Stock" - well, compare "stockroom", and "barrel", well, that's a container with staves, used for shipping all manner of stuff. The "Lock" part, I simply assumed was something I didn't know about, maybe the padlock on a treasure chest or something.

Thanks, Rich

ow

Specifically it refers to a muzzle-loader's main subassemblies.

Cannot resist ...

Finnish is a totally different beast from the germanic (or old Viking) languages: The only living language resembling Finnish so far that I can guess about half of it is Estonian. Hungarian is a distant relative: from a distance it sounds familiar, but I cannot catch a word. The whole group of Fenno-Ugrian languages should have gone the way of dinosaurs aeons ago. Maybe the rescue has been the remote location we are in, similarly as the original Viking language is deep-frozen in Icelandic.

For me, with Swedish as second native language, Norwegian sounds like funny Swedish, but Danish pronounciation is impossible, though written Danish can be understood with some guesswork (or a dictionary).

How about Sami? For somebody who knows neither Finnish or Sami, the two have certain 'acoustic' characteristics in common, but that might just be a coincidence?

My native dialect seems to be a somewhat better staring point for speaking English, and particularly Italian.

Danes speak as if they have a boiling hot potato in their mouth. And no, that's only half a joke: It seems that Danish kids are among the slowest to learn their native language, lagging developments of other native languages by maybe as much as 50% (Danish kids meet linguistic expectations for 2-year-olds at age 3).

Rune

Jim Wilkins schrieb:

There's a slight difference:

EN GE mother Mutter mothers Mütter (Muetter) hex nut Mutter hex nuts Muttern

HTH ;-)

Reinhard

That was intentional in that particular movie, and even as a native English speaker I had to have a lot of it explained to me by some British friends. Many of the jokes and the verbal nuances in that movie had to do with the plays on Cockney rhyming slang. It's a much deeper and interesting movie when you're aware of that, and I think much of it still went over my head.

That would rather be ``Katzenmusik'' in German. You might want to look up both terms at

I have scanned and put on the Web a work by Wilhelm Busch, author of ``Max und Moritz'', called ``Katzenjammer am Neujahrsmorgen''. You can find it at

I am sure it was intentional. Still, I think its dialog was a very good example on the difference between written and spoken language. The non-cockney English came across as very formalistic and stylized etc. The cockneys I have worked with, talked nowhere near the dialog of that movie.

I've seen the movie a couple of times, but with Norwegian subtitles. I must admit that with the subtitles, my attention to the spoken dialog is not quite as high as it might have been.

Rune