Mm, that reminds me of something that amused me a great deal when I was fourteen: the Spanish word ano means “anus”. The word año, however, means “year”. And, of course, native Spanish speakers let everyone know this back in Spanish 1, so we could all giggle when someone forgot the tilde in “Tengo catorce años.”
points and giggles
And watch out for the mist as you stroll through a german cow pasture.
mist=manure
One Hundred Solitary Assholes. . .
When an alternative radio station played a (thankfully brief) bit of Kevin Federline’s song “Popozao,” they claimed that the title means “big butt” in another language but did not mention which one. Here are the lyrics:
http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2005/12/31/popozao/
Have fun.
and exactly why i have several rolls of wrapping paper printed with the word ‘gift’ all over it=) is especially fun to wrap bottles of wine in for my german friends
The Armenian word for ‘kiss’ is batchik, pronounced “butt cheek.” So if an Armenian ever says “kiss me” I could not help hearing “kiss my butt cheek.”
You might be interested to know the very same thing happened in different branches of the Turkic language family. Turkic has two roots for ‘do’: et- and qil-. In any given language, one of these roots will be used to mean ‘do’ while the other falls out of use because it gets used as a synonym for having sex. Turks are very polite people and are pretty careful not to offend. Sometimes the two roots alternate over time: Let’s say et- becomes shunned as a sexually-stigmatized ‘do’. So qil- is the only ‘do’ root remaining. Then it starts to be used for sex because people will anyway want to talk about sex. Until it can’t be used any more, so bring et- back in…
And if a baker asked you how many rolls you wanted him to make, and you wanted half a dozen, you’d tell him “Fac sex”. The latter word being pronounced just like in English.
On a less naughty note, Latin has no word for “Yes” or “No”. To answer a yes-no question, you restate part of the question. So if you asked an ancient Roman fish if it swam, the answer would be “No.”. Which literally means “I swim”.
Everytime this kind of thread comes up I’m reminded of the time in high school when a boy in my class attempted to french-ify the word ‘insane’ because he couldn’t remember the translation, and wound up declaring that he was not completely pregnant
I have something similar.
My nickname in spanish among my family, Kike (keekay), is a derogatory for jews in american english.
No…I meant to clarify that it was Swedish. I was there recently and saw all sorts of funny words.
I forgot what “fart” is, but the entrance to gas stations were all marked with a sign “infarting.”
Kant in Afrikaans means “side” but the a sounds a lot closer to “uh” than “ah”. Ander, which means “other”, has the same pronunciation for the A.
If someone asks you where something is, you could say “Daar ander kant” (There on the other side), which to the uninitiated might sound like a suggestion that a woman is sitting on it.
The English word cushion sounds like a French word for pig (cochon), so if your French is a little sketchy and you try filling in the blanks with English words, you could easily be asking for a pig to put on your uncomfortable chair.
Danish has some good ones;
‘Fart’ in Danish is ‘Speed’ in English. When roadworks are being done on the motorways around here there are often these machines on the side of the road that display ‘din fart’ (‘your speed’) to try and keep you to the speed limit. I did hear that these get removed when English speaking dignitaries are visiting
‘Gift’ in Danish is another good one. It shares the German translation to ‘poison’ but also means ‘married’…now there is an odd duality of terms.
‘Skat’ in Danish is one that demonstrates the Danes attachement to taxes. It means both ‘tax’ and ‘darling’ when translated to English.
I’m trying to think of some others, but need a coffee boost first.
grey_ideas
I think that’s the Swedish meaning of “fart” I was looking for, “speed.”
I’d presume a lot of the funny Swedish words I saw are close to the same in Danish, as the two langauges are pretty similar, right? When I was in Sweden, my friends could read and understand Danish fairly easily (they had some Danish TV stations), but I don’t know if that’s because the two langs are really close to one another or because my friends had studied Dansih (I saw a swed-dan dictionary in their apartment).
Sort of, Danish and Norwegian are the closest to each other and (as far as I understand) they don’t have any problems understanding each other. Swedish is a little different, there are Swedes and Danes that don’t understand each other. Although most of the time it will only take them a little bit of exposure to the other language to be able to understand. I had a Swedish friend who moved to Denmark and said for the first month or so she had a really hard time understanding the Danes, but after that she was fine. There are a lot of common words, but also a lot of differences. Oddly enough I can read Norwegian without too many problems but I can’t understand it spoken too well. The Danes and Norwegians find that odd, but I think the different accent on the same words is what throws me off.
Again, this is from my understanding of it. Might be better to let the Nordic lot come in here and tell you who they do and don’t understand. But the Danes do tend to get the most stick from the other countries for their unintelligible language
grey_ideas
My memory is a bit hazy, it is about 20 yrs since I was in Greece, BUT I seem to recall that Malacca (Malakka?) meant wanker.
The straights of Malacca (off Malaysia) always make me giggle.
Of course English to English can be just as amusing to the immature mind.
Fannypack is one of the funniest words/phrases ever.
Another one in Afrikaans is the word “vak” meaning “subject” - particularly academic subject within a school context. In Afrikaans, a “v” is pronounced as an “f” and, as TMINC says, an “a” is pronounced as “uh”. Imagine the hilarity that ensues whenever an Afrikaans teacher tries to talk about a “subject” to a class of adolescent boys…
Grim