In Romanian, “prince charming” literally translates to “pretty fetus”.
In my experience, Romanians tend to react to being confronted with this fact by going quiet for a while and then trying to tell you that this is not strictly incorrect but there’s more to it, and then they try to explain it away and then they go quiet again.
Just did it to a Romanian friend and I could just see the writing dots on the screen for a while. Success
I swear, it’s the exact same reaction every time. It’s amazing, like a culture-wide Manchurian Candidate activation code.
This says it’s actually “tip-toe goose” which . . . also good.
企鹅
企业 seems to mean “business / company / corpo / firm” and my dictionary says 企 is also an abbreviation for it. So I guess that’s how we get to the OP’s joke. I’m guessing 鹅企 would be read “Goose Corp.” then ?
“Hippo” in German translates as “The horse of the Nile”. It’s such a fun language, with its word combinations.
Got a thing without name? I present “-Zeug”!
- Fly thing? Flugzeug
- Fire thing? Feuerzeug
- Thing you need for work? Werkzeug
- The things that you punch to make sounds? Schlagzeug
- Unidentified things? Zeug
I love German.
It sounds like an Orc saying “zug.”
“Me take TPS report zug to work zug.”
No, a Zug ist a train. And it’s probably late
Basically the same in English-- the etymology is PIE through Greek and Latin meaning river horse. Historians call horse/chariot stadiums from ancient Greece hippodromes.
Still called river horse in Swedish (flodhäst), not exclusive to the Nile though.
Lemmy told me that raccoon in German literally translates as “washing bear” and I still think about that at least once a week
Wash Rat in French
Its true for Dutch, so I’m sure it’s true for German as well, in Dutch it’s called a wasbeer
Tvättbjörn in Swedish
hurr hurr twat bear
de wasbeer im de kukstooel
Can confirm, Waschbär in German.
It’s an amazing language. My favorite is the word for contraceptive pills: antibabypille!
Wait till you learn what “airplane”, “lighter”, and “tool” are.
I have this with the Spanish translation of toes. Dedos de los pies. The literal translation would be fingers of the foot.
In Japanese a thermos bottle is called 魔法瓶/Mahoubin, which literally translated means magic bottle.
They love their magic stuff in Japan. They call velcro “magic tape”.
One of my favorites from Japanese is that they call mons pubis the “shame/embarassed hill” (恥丘), because of course they have to be weird about it.
It’s beyond weird, you see this in lots of places where the patriarchy influenced society and language to this point of control and inequality between the sexes. Only in recent years where i live have these terms been changed in favor of a more equal view on genders with language that reflects that to go with it.
It seems like tape is more magical than Velcro.
edit: s/that/than/
