Today I was waiting for the bus and started thinking about my favorite thing about Bulgarian - its word order is not completely unlike the way Yoda speaks. It really tickles me to say stuff like “tired I am” and “weather the very nice is, isn’t it?” and “next the week to Chicago will I go.”
Languages very are fun!
(I have never seen The Empire Strikes Back in Bulgarian, but I once asked my friend who LOVES Star Wars if Yoda uses strange word order, and she said yes. I like to think they probably just translate directly from the English - that would look pretty funny in Bulgarian.)
Also, the word for “vacuum cleaner” is prahusmukatchka. PRAHUSMUKATCHKA. It’s fun to say!
Tell me what amuses you about different languages. I’d love to hear what ESL speakers think is amusing in English, too.
I have know a Polish guy who’s lived in the US for many years. One thing he misses is the case indications of declensions in Polish. In other words, since the endings usually make it clear which noun is the subject, which is the object, etc., you can vary the word order quite a bit for emphasis without the sentence becoming unclear or sounding too weird.
I think I’ve previously mentioned these two from before I got a hold of a Polish-English dictionary:
Some how I got the idea that *nieruchomosci *meant “pregnancy.” Then I started seeing signs all over Krakow that included that word. It means “real estate.”
I saw signs all over town saying “buro stomatologiczne.” “How odd,” I thought, “that stomach ailments are so common here.” Then I saw such a sign that also bore a picture of a tooth. It made much more sense that there would be that many dentists.
Ha! I used to be amazed by all of the signs I saw in Bulgaria that said НОТАРИУС, which reads pretty much as “notorious”. I thought they were all slutty clothing shops or dance clubs. (It would be very normal to name a slutty clothing shop or a dance club after an English word that most people wouldn’t understand…but why would there be so many of them with the same name?) Then I discovered that it meant…notary public.
Yep" is the imperative form of a naughty word in Russian. I’m told that in regions of the U.S. where “yep” is a common form of “yes,” Russians find this endlessly amusing.
When I was in Bulgaria, the warning signs on the electrical poles, etc at the train station were marked “opacniye za jivot” which means “dangerous to life” in Bulgarian, but means “Dangerous to your stomach” in Russian.
I was always amused thinking that Russians are extra tough – electrical shocks that would be fatal to a Bulgarian would only cause a Russian a mild stomach ache.
Micaela (the best second-language teacher ever) taught us how to find the underlying common structures between Spanish and English. I consider myself native in three languages (Spanish, English and Catalan) and have had one or more years of class in Latin, French and German; I’ve also spent time working and talking with people whose mother tongue (and sometimes, only tongue) was Portuguese or Italian.
I’ve had moments like looking at my Catalan as first language, German-SL classmates and being the one to point out common stuctures between German and Catalan (for me Catalan is the second or third language depending on how you count).
My WoW guild has a TON of Swedes and some Dutch folk. I probably wouldn’t be able to understand a word if I heard them speak, but when they chat in their languages I can grasp a lot of the conversation unless it’s about food (not just wow-stuff, but also sports or politics) thanks to commonality with other languages.
And then, there was that Chinese teacher… in theory he could speak English (he’d been in the US for more than 11 years and had become an American citizen). In theory. One day, coming out of his class, I asked one of the Chinese students “in Chinese, do you use one word to say ‘a lot’ and then use ‘not plus that word’ to say ‘a little’?” He thought and said “yes, why do you ask?” “Because HE does it…” (a “negative charge differential” was, in the teacher’s speak, “no little little no charge”).
So I guess what I find funny is that so much about learning other languages is “the little differences” and yet now and then you run into “a huge difference.”
In Hebrew, there is a word that means a covering, a pouch , or a case (like the case you carry your glasses in, or the little pocket pouch that engineering nerds but their pens in).
But the same word , in medical terminology, means vagina.
So…(you know what’s coming:…)
a guy at my office ask me to hand him his vagina, the one over there on the table…
The etymologies for some Russian words are very cute. The Russian word for “pillow” comes from “under the ear.” “Alarm clock” is “wake-me-up.” And refrigerator? “Cold-maker.” I love it. It’s like what would happen if a refrigerator tried to take over the world. “Beware, mortals, for I am the Cold-Maker!”
I was away on holiday with my wonderful Lithuanian friend. She has quite a silly sense of humour, and decided to hide around a corner and jump out and surprise me. So one would expect she would shout ‘Surprise!’…
I loved that she in fact shouted ‘Ah, you didn’t *expect *me!’
Mmm, I love pain with chocolate, in no small part because it makes me giggle every time.
I have a particular fondness for the - to my ears, anyway - primal assertiveness of the Spanish language’s “I have hunger!” I’m not hungry, I have hunger, which for some reason conjures images of an angry, hungry Viking-type with a big axe, roaring at their prey. In my mind it needs to be an exclamation, not merely a statement. ¡Tengo hambre!
I haven’t studied it in any kind of depth but I am superficially fascinated by the concept of evidentiality in languages.
I read a great story not long ago about a linguist, studying the Cochiti of the American Southwest, who was trying to find out the first person possessive form of “wings”. Nobody would tell him, because this would require the speaker to say “my wings” and the speaker couldn’t say “my wings” because he didn’t have wings. The dilemma was finally solved when the Cochiti realised that it was ok for the linguist himself to say “my wings”… because his name was Robin.
Klein, in German, is little; kein is no, as an adjective (e.g., “yes, we have no bananas”). I love how a word with a diminutive meaning loses a letter to become a word describing the absence of something. This has to be the source of some German wordplay, right?
This reminds me of certain Spanish words that combine verb and noun to describe the object, such as paraguas (stops water), saltamontes (jumps mountains), and chupacabras (sucks goats). “Oh, I don’t mind that it’s raining, I have my stops water right here!”
I also love the Spanish way of adding the suffix “ón/óna” to describe people or things who have a prominent feature. Examples I’ve heard are narizón (guy with a big nose), chillona (little girl who whines constantly), and pollón (guy with a large, um, male body part). My favorite incidence was my roommate talking about a girl who always wore a giant pair of sunglasses (gafas): “I hate her! She’s a gafona!”
My favorite word in any language is zapatos, which is Spanish for shoes. It’s so much fun to say! Zapatos!
I used to work at a Subway, and a girl with a middle-eastern accent (sorry, I don’t know the accents well enough to tell you which country) got stuck when she wanted pickles on her sandwich. After a bit of pointing (That one? No. How about that one? No.) to figure out what she wanted she asked me what they were called. The word “pickles” gave her a giggle fit. “Pickles? Really? They are called pickles?” I don’t know if pickles means something else in her native language, or if she just thought the word sounded funny.
Pickles also sounded mildly disturbing to me at first because the English word is a false friend for German Pickel - pimple (as in undesirable skin feature) or pick (as in implement).
What’s an amusing failure of my own language (German) is not to distinguish between llamas and lamas.
