Krankenwagen = sick car = ambulance
Krankenhaus = sick house = hospital
German (as well as most of the germanic family) does word construction really well.
Help I’m kranken, someone call a krankenwagon to take me to the krankenhaus before I krank again
Entschuldigung, but the Krankenwagen is krank and must be taken to the Wagenkrankenhaus in the Krankerwagenkrankenwagen.
We will send the Krankenpfleger Klaus and his Krankenschwester Klara to pick you up in a Rollstuhl.
Oh no, Klaus will pick me up with his Flurfördergerät.
The “en” part puts “krank” in genitive though, so “car of the sick” or “sick’s car” would be a more accurate translation. The car is not sick after all.
Krankenhandy
Danish uses “hospital” as a word, but they also have “sygehus” (house of the sick).
Apparently, English also has “sickhouse”: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sickhouse#English
Germany has Hospital as well. But it sounds archaic.
If I recall correctly hospitals were just the only “hotels” sick people could afford. So that’s where nuns would go to care for them. So more sick people would come because they would get good care there. Until they made the hospitals the official house where they care for sick people.
While that may be an element it also comes from the Knights Hospitallers who would set up rest stops for pilgrims. The thing is pilgrims would often get sick and have to be taken care of by the Hospitallers, which also blends into what you’re talking about.
That’s probably the full story. I couldn’t remember it all.
That’s why “hospitable” isn’t anything you expect the average hospital to be.
In swiss german it still is “Spital”.
In Switzerland, the word Spital is in use instead of Krankenhaus
How about sick move?
Kranke Bewegung, but we don’t say it in that context, not even for Parkinson patients who literally got sick moves.
救護車
救 --> save/rescue
護 --> protect
車 --> car/vehicleaka: Ambulance
An ambulance is a life saving car protecting you, or to abbreviate it, an SCP.
An ambulance is an SCP confirmed.
Interesting what languages go with, as Japanese keeps the save part but drops the protect in favor of hurry/emergency, so it’s the “hurry up and save you car” 救急車
Even ambulance itself comes from the French phrase walking hospital, and then the hospital part got dropped. We still retain the word ambulant to mean moving in English
It’s exactly the same in Thai:
ตู้ “dtuu” - Cupboard
เย็น “yen” - cool
ตู้เย็น “dtuu•yen” - RefrigeratorReally, nobody is going to point out that “cupboard” = “cup” + “board”?
The issue that makes it less intuitive is the “board” part. I’d assume a “cupboard” used to be a shelf, a board for putting cups on, but it evolved to have wooden walls around it so is it really a “board” anymore?
The board is still there, but “cupbox” might be more accurate. 🤔️
And if that board rots away and is gradually replaced, at what point does it cease to be the original board?
The cupboard of Theseus
German is wild. Sometimes its like the spacebar was never invented and you get such beauties as Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaugabenübertragungsgesetz
Da fehlt ein f. :-)
With the missing f it’s now a law about the transfer of talents of meadows used for the supervision of the labeling of beef.
I’m not sure why they’re supervising that on a meadow but the meadow is clearly very talented.
lemmygold.png
auFgaben
Scheisse!
After the invention of the spacebar, it took another three hundred years to invent the period.
https://www.matthiasbrinkmann.de/wordpress/2016/07/what-is-the-longest-sentence-in-kant/
But why separate the parts if it is one word
Some languages don’t even have spaces. Writing systems are irrelevant formality and not exceptional at all. I prefer the lack of space for it clearly shows that that’s a compound word
English is the funny north German dialect that moved to an island and went mental.
Lol, It’s all the French influence
German syntax, with the “I don’t want to pronounce that letter” of French. A wonderful combination.
Don’t forget the Celtic influence that gave English the meaningless do.
I never get why glove is handschuh rather than handsocke.
Because Socken are the inner layer whereas Handschuhe, like Schuhe, are the outer (or only) layer.
That makes sense. The bit that threw me off with it is that shoes tend to be pretty solid and inflexible where as gloves tend not to be, hence thinking it would make more sense to be socks.
I’m all for putting handshoe in english, myself.
I’m pretty sure I’ve actually said that…
Or why isn’t shoe “futgloven” or something?
Mehrfamilienhaus = more families house / apartment
Why new words when old words good?
I like new words, like Rucksackriemenquerverbindungsträger (the horizontal connection between the straps of your backpack that makes the backpack magically less heavy when closed)
House - Haus
Animal - Tier
Pet - Haustier
Similar in Finnish:
Koti - home
Eläin - animal
Kotieläin - pet
Undersea boat is my favorite German word. Why make a new word when you can mash shit together?
sub - under
marine - seaYou and I, we’re not so different :)
I’m personally partial to highwayservicestations for being a compact way to say 2 words as one and shieldfrogs because shieldfrogs are awesome.
If you like this you’ll love Chinese! A language where books were printed with literal blocks of wood!
Yes, and the language works this way too:
电 (diàn) : lightning
脑 (nǎo) : brain
电脑 : computer
Japanese is also similar
Japanese: コンピューター (Kon pyuu taa) 🗿
I suspect every language does this to some extent. Some good examples from Japanese:
靴 = shoes 下 = under 靴下 = socks
手 = hand 紙 = paper 手紙 = letter
歯 = teeth 車 = wheel 歯車 = cog / gear
火 = fire 山 = mountain 火山 = volcano
Sadly (?) the Japanese compounds are often only compounds of the symbols, not the spoken words.
Well 🇩🇪
Zahn = Tooth
Rad = Wheel
Zahnrad = cog 🎉
We took that into Hungarian
Fog = Tooth
Kerék = Wheel
Fogaskerék = Toothywheel = CogWell, is a cog actually a toothy wheel for everybody but the English language?
Wouldnt be surprised if it was. looking at pineapple
Even more than the compound words I really like the kanji that have basically pure pictograph meanings, like mountain pass being “mountain up down” 峠.
Side note my favorite mnemonic is for the word (hospital) patient, where a person (者) ate too much meat on a stick, and now the problem is in their heart 串 + 心 --> 患者
well every language except English I guess.
We might not have as many as German or Japanese, but we do have some. Toothbrush, waterwheel, phonebook, stovetop, bookshelf, Headphone, bedspread, newspaper, etc.
Or for the example in the actual original post “ice box.”
Ah yes, the re-frigid-air-inator
Read it in his voice!
icebox is sorta similar.
An icebox is Gefrierschrank.
Follow me for more german words.Eiskasten is also a (very outdated) one.
English really is the weird one in this. Constructing new words with old ones makes a lot more sense than just stealing the words from other languages and mashing them in without changing much
All languages borrow, including German. English is not at all weird in this way.
Borrowing itself is normal, yeah, but english tends to go to the extremes with that. Even yoinking words like smörgåsbord as they are
English does have an above-average percentage of loanwords, but not the highest. Armenian and Romani are over 90% borrowings, for example.
Also, note that “smorgasbord” has undergone significant phonological adaptation in its borrowing to fit English’s phonotactics - it’s definitely not borrowed as-is.
Fair enough
Norway has some of the allegedly most unhinged word constructions via “cake”. It had the modern meaning of a baked sweet, but also any sorta roundish cooked thing that is not sweet, and the old meaning of “any hard lumped mass”.
So we have, in order of descending sanity:
- Bløtkake - soft cake, sponge cake
- Småkake - small cake, cookie
- Kjøttkake - meat cake, ground meat patties
- Fiskekake - fish cake, ground fish meat patties
- Oljekake - oil cake, lump of mass left after pressing oil out of linseeds
- Blodkake - blood cake, lump of dried blood
- Morkake - mother cake, placenta
- Kukake - cow cake, cow poop
And the infamous Bukake.
Kukake
(≖_≖ )
Kind of funny, in German you could also consider it “Kuhkacke” (literally cow poo). Weird that it’s so similar and means the same thing but is presumably etymologically very different.
We have the Mutterkuchen (placenta) in German as well.
But, one German word for shit is Kacke. Coincidence? I think not!
English has ‘cow patty’, which except for still being two words seems not so different from that last one.
We have lehmakool (cow cake) in Estonian too and I found it absolutely hilarious as a kid reading some children’s book. Might have been one of those Bullerby books by Astrid Lindgren, but I might also remember wrong
