I was watching a Mexican movie the other day and they spoke about going on the “Montaña Rusa”. I had never really paid any attention to it but it translates to:
Russian Mountain.
What the heck?
Anyways, I ran it by a Russian co-worker today and she found it very amusing, until she told me in Russia, they call them:
American Mountain!
Wha what?
Anyways… I just had to know what they’re called in other languages, and what Doper’s thoughts on the matter were.
Yeah, because if you called them “mountains” the Dutch wouldn’t know what you were talking about.
(Ja, ja, pardon, het spijt me, ik weet dat Nederlanders met bergen bekend zijn. )
Oh, and just to justify my presence here, the Hindi word for rollercoaster is टेढा़-मेढा़ रस्ता (“tedhaa-medhaa rastaa”) or something like “twisty-curly road”, although they also use a transliteration of the English word “switchback”.
If you ever need coaster trivia/information try some of the links on http://www.aceonline.org/links/
They list parks from around the world which could get you into some of the names/terminology.
(My favorite coaster is the Dog Fart at BonBon Land, Denmark)
In German: Berg- und Talbahn (mountain and valley-train, like in Swedish) or Achterbahn (figure-eight train, as in Dutch), mainly since the traditional mobile ones you see at fairs usually are built in a figure eight conformation.
In Japanese, it’s just ローラーコースター (rōrākōsutā), a pretty straightforward borrowing of “roller coaster.” You might also see 絶叫マシン (zekkyoumashin, also with a long i variant), literally “scream machine” or “shout machine,” in a more general context of thrill rides, which would include but not be limited to roller coasters.
in Russian it is “American (small) mountains”. Incidentally, there is no equivalent “stock price roller coaster” and similar idiomatic expressions, so the phrase refers only to the actual ride.
If you break down ‘vasút’ or ‘railway’ even further the translation is iron road. So, ‘iron road wave’. Hungarian tends towards the literally descriptive.
I grew up speaking Polish, but, oddly enough, while I knew the Hungarian word for it, didn’t have a clue what the Polish was, so had to look it up. Apprently, it’s “kolejka górska,” which means something like “mountain train/rail.”
Looks like it’s both. I was doing the “check Wikipedia, then verify on WWWJDIC” method, but I forgot to look for alternate words. Didn’t read past the article title, either, or I would have seen:
One of my Welsh dictionaries lists ffigar-êt, which took me a minute to parse: It’s the British English word “figure” + “eight” (Welsh would be “ffurf” + “wyth”). So “Figure Eight” must have been used in English at one time, too. That said, looking around online, most Welsh speakers seem to say “roller coaster” with English spelling and pronuciation.
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