What does “funk” mean in German words? It seems to be very common yet the translation is not obvious to me.
Radio or broadcasting.
What’s the earlier derivation? I have a real hard time believing that my friend, whose last name is Funkhauser, had ancestors in the 17th century and earlier who ran the local Radio Shack.
Well, “das Funkeln” is “the blaze”…as in a blaze of fire., so, for example, ein Funkfeuer is a beacon, because it’s a fire you blaze up to signal, funkelt means glitters, the way a fire does. Then of course, there are other words with the letters “funk” in them, like “Funktion”, which as you can imagine, means “function”. What particular words or kind of words are you wondering about?
In many modern words it means something related to radio or broadcasting.
It stems from the word Funken (spark). This is because some of the earliest wireless telegraphs used spark gap transmitters. This created the association with radio, and many compounds have been formed using ‘funk’. It gets added at both the beginning (Funkspruch, Funkbearbeitung) and at the end (Mobilfunk, Bordfunk).
One place it isn’t used, though, is for portable radio sets (and words made from them), which use the word ‘radio’.
The “CD Size” thread has me thinking of Beethoven’s Ninth:
Freude, schöne Götterfunken…
(literally, “Joy, beautiful spark of the gods”)
… and they wanted your address when you tried to buy oil lamps!
In some contexts, it means exactly the same as it does in English: an odour. Spandau prisoner Albert Speer once exploited this polysemy to pun on co-inmate Walther Funk’s last name.