The german word for airplane literally just translates to “flying thing.”
Also the word fot lighter is “fire thing.”
The English word means flying flat thing. Naming new things for a society is hard. Think about the word movie. It’s absolutely hilarious.
I think the difference with that English word - and indeed many like it in English - is that it’s wearing a disguise borrowed from another language (Latin, at least in part, in this case). German has fewer pretensions.
But where English does have a word made up of native, undisguised parts, we don’t realise we’re probably thinking about those words the same way Germans do with theirs. That is, we don’t really think about the deconstruction unless we’re explicitly asked to, or something unusual triggers an etymological enlightenment.
Or else we had that enlightenment long ago and it’s no longer exciting, I guess.
I’m just glad ‘talkie’ didn’t take hold
The beauty of agglutination. New words can be created without new vocabulary, sometimes regardless of technological changes. In Esperanto, there is no dedicated word for “cell phone”, but a word is needed to refer to these devices, so it’s “poŝtelefono”, or “pocket phone”.
The word for toy is “play thing”
Go for Wieheister now, it always fascinated me 😂
It regretfully is not called hand socks.
The word “humans” in Swedish is similar:
We say “människor”, which is we split it up a bit becomes:
“Män” “i” “skor”, or translated:
“Men” “in” “shoes”
Sounds like the name of an 80s band.
We Dutch never get credit for doing/sounding almost the same.
HANDSCHOENEN
Guten Tag
Diese Kommentarsektion ist jetzt Eigentum der BRD GmbH… oder so ähnlich
🇧🇷 Luvas (loo-vas)
Why is the mime so surprised though?
It is not supposed to talk.
That is a thought bubble from the mime.
lámhainní is gloves in Irish. Làmh is the Irish for hand.
And what’s ainni?
