I love how paperclips are called trombones in french

list other fun translations for things.

French is great for this - chauve-souris as bat. Because obviously the most obvious thing about a bat is that it's bald, and not the fact it can fly.

cars are called 'steam vehicles' or 'vapor cars' in chinese

germans are the best for this! i'm sure there's a thread that mentions some of them

the 1 i remember - nipples = breast warts

tbh english is pretty great for this as well. lot of words that are odd that don't seem odd to us. will have to dwell on this.

99 luftballon.

Air balloons. So's you don't mistake them for the other kind.

I mean, all languages are pretty weird and things get grandfathered and blah blah blah linguistics

German uses "Nippel" as well as "Brustwarze" so at first I had no idea what just sayin was talking about

Vachement Chouette = Cowly Owl = Really great

Muckefuck is German for faux coffee/coffee substitute.

Boite a musique? (What time is it?)
Twelve Thirty
Ton cul vieille mouche (thank you very much)

Un petit d'un petit...

French is great for word games of course. You used to get all those "on ne dit pas..." jokes inside Carambar wrappers.

Haven't had a Carambar for about 6 years :-(

in french the old crude T-bar ski lifts that you hardly ever see any more are called "butt pullers"

Stinktier = skunk

Cheese burger, in Hungarian, is pronounced "Shiteburger"

I love "entrejambe" for "crotch" because a) crotch! & b) it is so blunt: your crotch is your "between the legs". I know German is full of this kind of smooshing word thing but still.

http://www.artvalue.com/photos/auction/0/46/46246/man-ray-radnitsky-emmanuel-189-allume-tes-gitanes-2311553-500-500-2311553.jpg

Allume tes gitanes

Spanish: "madreselva" means "honeysuckle," literally "mother-jungle."
Portuguese: "beija-flor" means "hummingbird," literally "kiss-flower."

More from Spanish:
(a) quemarropa - (at)point blank range - "to burn clothing"

and those two that are similar to but seems more striking than the English version
rompecabezas - brain-teaser, puzzle - "breaker of heads"
asaltacunas - cradle robber - "assaulter of cradles"

i was told once that the spanish for speedbump is "lying-down policeman"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_policeman

French for honeysuckle is chèvrefeuille - goat leaf.
French for gooseberry is groseille à maquereau - mackerel berries.

German for fried egg is spiegelei - mirror egg.

Old (I think) German word for psychiatrist or psychologist is Seelenarzt- soul doctor. Although maybe this is just slang and shouldn't count.

Bahasa Malay has some great re-spellings of words borrowed from English. Sorry I mean INGGERIS! <3

wow did I ever misread that

Dandelion, from old French dent de lion (lion's tooth) is now called pissenlit. There is a variant name for it in English that perfectly translates the newer French term: pissabed. If you've ever had a dandelion salad, you can probably attest to its diuretic qualities.

haha that is awesome.

Do they have a nickname for watermelon along the same lines?

pasteque

hmm sort of sounds like "piss-take?"

in spanish, toes are dedos del pie (fingers of the foot)

we called them pee the beds when i was a child! (in scotland) xxxpost

Pastèque always makes me think pas steak, 'not steak'.

There are apparently a lot of languages where there's a 'vulgar' variant referring to how they make one micturate, jed.

I like how cloudy is "trouble" in French

a food processor in french is a ROBOT DE CUISINE

I like how cloudy is "trouble" in French

Only for liquids, though. A cloudy sky is couvert or nuageux.

i always liked 'aardappel' as the dutch word for potato - earth apple!

food processor

or robot ménager

Donna it's the same in French too!

pomme de terre

hah, right! forgot that.

though i think "aardappel" is more fun to say aloud

identkit in French is robot-portrait, no?

Portrait robot yeah.

Like to sing "aardapfel" to the tune of "Earth Angel"

in Austria and Bavaria a potato is also sometimes called an "Erdapfel" or "Erdbirne" (earth pear)

similarly, aardbei/Erdbeer for strawberry and aardnoot/Erdnuss for peanut (guess this is not so wacky since we call it a groundnut too - and in a way straw-berry is a weirder name than ground-berry)

Tomatoes used to be pommes d'amour (though confusingly this also means candy apple). Pomme is modified a lot for round fruits or veg in French. Pomme de pin, pomme de grenade (hence our pomagranate)...

Woa did not know that tomatoes were called pommes d'amour.

They were thought to be poisonous, too.

pommes d'amour

Ah, il pomodoro!

chauve-souris reminds me that I always wanted to start a thread about things that have four or five completely different and unrelated names across English, French, German, Spanish and Italian, but I never knew who would participate in such a thread or what to call it.

What do the French expect when they click on a link to sadtrombone.com ? A sad paperclip?

Strawberries are grown over straw to stop the fruit rotting (which it would if it touched the ground).

A guinea pig is an Indian pig in French and a little sea pig in German.

An obvious one, but the german word for glove is "hand shoe"

It's as though the germans developed feet before hands.

This is more a fun false friend than an odd literal construction, but a lot of -tion words in English can easily be made Czech by changing them to -ce (and sometimes changing c to k) i.e., revolution=revoluce, calculation=kalkulace, action=akce
This, however, does not work for "pollution", as "poluce" means wet dream.

An obvious one, but the german word for glove is "hand shoe"

― rock rough 'n' stuff with h.r. pufnstuf (Hurting 2), Thursday, April 28, 2011 2:51 PM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark

Yes!

I also like German words for things that are really simple. Like a lighter is a "fire thing".

An airplane is a "flight thing".

Ah, il pomodoro!

Actually golden apple.

"pollution", as "poluce" means wet dream.

Self-pollution, obv.

x-post yep

There are a lot of other ones like that. German has tons of awesome words many of which have already been mentioned but I'm blanking on others atm.

One of the nicknames for testicles is "eggs" which is sort of more accurate a description than balls.

There are a lot of great "complicated words from smaller simple words" constructions in chinese IIRC, but I don't actually know Chinese.

Actually golden apple.

I realised that after posting. Made more sense when I thought it had an "a" in. Still sounds similar enough that there may be a connection.

I like "Tintenfisch", ink-fish, for squid and cuttlefish.

German word for nurse is Krankenschwester, "sickness sister."

Yes!!!! I love that one.

Büstenhalter - bra

Breasts holder.

Guess what animal is a nose horn Nashorn in German.

Ich heiße Michael Büstenhalter

Rhino?

Yep. Nosehorn!

I've always loved how the French word for "single" (relationship-wise) is "célibataire." Gets right to the heart of the matter.

Oh man now I'm on a roll - the word for the runs is durchfall meaning fall through. I've always found that particularly descriptive.

"pollution", as "poluce" means wet dream.

Self-pollution, obv.

http://www.librarycompany.org/doctor/onania.jpg

Oh! After visiting Duisburg zoo we decided that the English names should be ditched for "nosebear" (Nasenbär = coati) and "washbear" (Waschbär = raccoon). (xps)

Diarrhoea is the Greek for "fallthrough" too iirc.

Yes, Nashorn. Also like how the animal classifications have the word "animal" in them.

Lizard = Kriechtier, "crawling animal"
Mammal = Saugtier, "suckling animal" (maybe umlaut over the a?)

I like that living with your lover in French is concubinage.

I just realized though that rhinoceros must also literally mean nose horn but it's somehow better in German.

x-post - oooh that's good

Also like how the animal classifications have the word "animal" in them.

Yeah - Stinktier!!!

What's hippo in German? Hippopotamus is basically Greek for 'riverhorse'.

Yeah I love that hippo is riverhorse.

Apparently it's Das Flusspferd which I think would also be riverhorse?

I also like German chemical names: oxygen is "Sauerstoff" (sour stuff - compare how "oxy" is Greek for "bitter"), carbon is "Kohlenstoff" (charcoal stuff), etc

and if you like that sort of Germanic word construction, you may like to read the Poul Anderson short story Uncleftish Beholding

I was going to mention Sauerstoff!

I love that one.

Hm, that Uncleftish Beholding isn't complete. Here's a less nicely formatted one which I think is: http://groups.google.com/group/alt.language.artificial/msg/69250bac6c7cbaff

Railway stations are Voksal in russian because a group of Russian Engineers came to look at British railways in the 19th century and visited Vauxhall station in London saw the sign and thought that was the generic term.

Oh my goodness, is that true? <3

Poubelles (trash cans) are so called because of the préfet of the Seine, Eugène Poubelle, who imposed them.

Germans <3 calquing:

television - Fernseher (far-seer)
telephone - Fernsprecher (far-speaker, I think this one is obsolete)
peninsula - Halbinsel (half-island)

The way the French abuse English gerunds always makes me smile:

un parking - a car park
un camping - a campsite
un jogging - a tracksuit
un smoking - a dinner jacket
le fooding - gastronomy, being a foodie

Other random stuff:

transat - French for deckchair, from "transatlantique"

All time classic:

das Handy - German for mobile phone

Probably more appropriate for a "words that sound like other words but are different words" thread, but my reaction to this was "How could even the French think that Bibi Fuck is an appropriate name for a kids' cartoon?":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlzuU0fx-E8

This stuff even works in sign language. The sign (well, in Auslan anyway) for "oyster" is to press one's thumb against one nostril and make like you're blowing your nose, famer-style.

heart of the matter.

see, this is one of those English phrases that probably seems batshit to other cultures...batshit too

anyway, in Chinese, the character for 'beautiful' is made up from the radicals for 'sheep' and 'big,' so something beautiful is a big sheep

the character for 'male' is 'field' + 'strength' so a dude is somebody who is good at tending fields

btw the name for america in chinese is 'beautiful country'

Is it true the character for trouble is similar to wife or something? Wait, I'm not sure I got that right.

the chinese word for opportunity...

just looked it up and I don't think that's the case. xp

the chinese character for mother, which is now 母, originally depicted a girl with giant zoom zooms. the two little dots that remain in the current version are her nipples.

http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterEtymology.aspx?submitButton1=Etymology&characterInput=%E6%AF%8D

lol the chinese character for woman was pretty much the same as the character for mother in olden times, except without the nipples.

http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterEtymology.aspx?submitButton1=Etymology&characterInput=%E5%A5%B3

now it just looks like this: 女

Oh my goodness, Bibifoc! My sister and I were OBSESSED with that cartoon (and the hilarity of the name) as kids.

Old (I think) German word for psychiatrist or psychologist is Seelenarzt- soul doctor. Although maybe this is just slang and shouldn't count.

In Finnish, an old-fashioned word for psychology is "sielutiede" = "soul science".

Actually, I think many Finnish words were influenced by German (possibly via Swedish) - for example, the Finnish word for a rhino is also "horn nose" (or "horn snout", to be correct).

Some Spanish ones:

canguro = baby sitter
hacer una cobra = that uncomfortable moment when someone you don't want to tries to kiss you and you recoil. Like a cobra dancing.

heart of the matter.

You do know that our word 'core' comes from coeur, right?

Oh my goodness, Bibifoc!

Phoque means seal in French.

An obvious one, but the german word for glove is "hand shoe"

― rock rough 'n' stuff with h.r. pufnstuf (Hurting 2), Thursday, April 28, 2011 2:51 PM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark

Yes!

― \(^o\) (/o^)/ (ENBB), Thursday, April 28, 2011 3:41 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Just finally read through this thread and this one made me laugh. My paternal grandmother's maiden name was "Handschuh." :D

Fitted like a glove?! (Sorry)

Discussion about cartoon seal's name reminds me that in French the Michelin man is known as Bibendum, from the Latin Nunc est bibendum, "Now let us drink", but some wags also call him Biberon, baby bottle.

I thought in English the Michelin Man was also known as Bibendum? I mean, so I recall from the party where I invited guests who were made of tires.

My father once proclaimed to a client in German that he had a big "Rammelar". Apparently it's not a rattle - in Flemish it is - but a dick (in German).

In Japan, buffet restaurants are described as バイキング which is 'baikingu' - a transliteration of Viking.

http://www.eslpod.com/eslpod_blog/wp-content/uploads/2050/02/Chinese_buffet2.jpg

"Japan; that's where I'm a viking!"

Fireworks - feux d'artifice - artificial fire

Soda/Pop - boissons gazeuzes - gaseous beverages

I don't speak Japanese so this may be totally wrong but someone was telling me the Japanese for fireworks was something like fire cherry-blossoms

(don't think I even know enough about Japanese to fact-check this, sry)

While I'm in the same position as you, re: Japanese, I've also heard that all their names for illnesses are, compared to English, very simplified and literal. E.g. Diabetes is something like "sugar disorder," etc.

a transliteration of Viking.

Any connection to smörgåsbords?

The most common way to refer to a bruise in French is to call it a blue, un bleu.

And if you want to say you have the blues, you say you have le cafard, the cockroach.

Yes and the musical genre is singular; le blues.

The hangover is la gueule de bois, the face of wood.

Where gueule is kind of a rough word for face, so that we have the French expression ta gueule! which means (shut) your face!

Love that word baikungu. Heard about somebody in an intro Japanese class that always used to say that was their favorite food to eat.

The Japanese word for a certain kind of pink collar worker is "Office Lady" or simply OL, ooeru. The Japanese word for a dress shirt is wai shatsu, white shirt.

Gueule is weird. It's a word for a non-human's mouth but its usage in day to day French is most often along the lines of 'mug' or 'trap' or something.

das Handy - German for mobile phone

― Lidl Monsters (seandalai), Friday, 29 April 2011 10:20 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

in Chinese it's "hand machine"

btw the name for america in chinese is 'beautiful country'

― br8080 (dayo), Friday, 29 April 2011 10:45 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

a phonetic accident surely, otherwise france would be "law country"

Yes, exactly, Michael, I was thinking the same thing, trap or mug. There are other words which seem to have that non-human/human thing going on. I remember hearing some waitperson refer to food as "la bouffe," so later I said "j'ai bien bouffé" to somebody and he said "Speak French, man! You just said you ate like a pig!" But I dunno, I don't see anything about pigs in the dictionary, maybe he just meant don't use slang. Although in German there is essen "to eat" and fressen which is an animal eating, or slang for pigging out, with the noun das Fressen literally meaning an animals feed, but also meaning grub, as in Brecht's erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.

One more gueule expression is Gueules cassées, broken faces, which refers to wounded WWI veterans.

Food edition:

"avoir la peche" (to have the peach)
"avoir la banane" (to have the banana)
"avoir la patate" (to have the potato)

all mean something along the lines of being energetic, excited - "full of beans" might be an English alimentary analogue.

"es ist mir Wurst" (it's sausage to me) = I don't care about it

"pêche" instead of "peche", I guess.

You do know that our word 'core' comes from coeur, right?

― Concatenated without abruption (Michael White), Saturday, April 30, 2011 2:33 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

no idea! makes sense

was just thinking today that it's weird for flies to be called, well flies. because they, uh, fly. in the air. but so do any number of insects.

I was going to point out that butterflies used to be called flutter-bys, but according to the OED that's wrong:

Etymology: < butter n.1 + fly n.1; with Old English buttorfléoge compare Dutch botervlieg, earlier botervlieghe, modern German butterfliege. The reason of the name is unknown: Wedgwood points out a Dutch synonym boterschijte in k*l*an, which suggests that the insect was so called from the appearance of its excrement.

"Oh look at the pretty buttershit!"

Interesting. In Norwegian this insect is a sommerfugl, summer bird.

I thought in English the Michelin Man was also known as Bibendum? I mean, so I recall from the party where I invited guests who were made of tires.

Actually do you mean your guest were tire-wearing human beings, or were they dolls made from tires?

No, just a bunch of ghostly tire people, like Bibendum.

http://www.tyreplus.co.za/bibman/Bibendum_fills_up_with_air.gif

wkiw

i thought trombones was some cind of instrument

btw the name for america in chinese is 'beautiful country'

― br8080 (dayo), Friday, 29 April 2011 10:45 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

a phonetic accident surely, otherwise france would be "law country"

― it always seems to have dick smith in it (Autumn Almanac), Friday, 29 April 2011 22:58 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

and England/UK 'brave country'!

YINGGUO

or Yinggwok (learning Cantonese here, not Mandarin)

Germany is virtuous country

Australia is some shit to do with inlets

Also like how the name for The Beatles in Cantonese (pei tau sei) both works as a transliteration and means something like messy hair four.

The most common way to refer to a bruise in French is to call it a blue, un bleu.

And in dutch it means something completely different.

French for a tip is "pourboire" (pour + boire) which means for drinking, as in money you give the waiter to pay himself a drink. Same thing with vinegar - vinaigre - which is a concatenation of vin (wine) and aigre (sour). I remember finding it funny when I noticed that.

To be hung over in Spanish is the be "crudo," which is right on.

Also, glasses are sometimes called "anteojos" which means "before (in front of) eyes."

xpost my friend and I used to say we were feeling "crude" when we were hungover. Crudo actually means raw though. Mexican Spanish uses "pedo" for drunk sometimes, which is the word for fart.

And many xposts:

The way the French abuse English gerunds always makes me smile:

un parking - a car park
un camping - a campsite
un jogging - a tracksuit
un smoking - a dinner jacket
le fooding - gastronomy, being a foodie

Spanish does this a lot too, abusing them even worse than the French: Parking, Camping and Esmoquin (smoking) are used the same way, plus "puenting" for bungee jumping ("puente"=bridge) and my personal favorite/most horrifying "footing" meaning jogging!

"le footing" is also used by the French iirc.

it is indeed

Le babyfoot = table football

In Chilean Spanish table football is called taca taca.

Nostrils in Spanish : las ventanillas de la nariz. The little windows of the nose.

En español they also say "hasta las narices" to mean fed up/ up to HERE with someone something. It literally means up to the noses and why it's plural is beyond me.

And foosball/table football is called futbolín (a diminutive of just plain fútbol) in Spanish Spanish

The Czech expression for "hair of the dog" is "vyprošťovák", which is one of those trucks that tows your car out of a ditch.
Fireworks is "ohni stroje" which translates to "fire machines".

The literal English thread reminded me of another German one I always thought cute. Baumschule = nursery in the botanical sense. Tree school!

Same in Entish, right?

Is it?

Yeah, it is (and I found that a bit confusing when younger).

Ha MW - didn't realize that didn't say "English" until just now. :)

I love that chopsticks in French are baguettes

Baguette means wand in French.

I like ferretería - hardware store in Spanish, sounds like a store that sells ferrets.

Or a store that sells iron

I'm sure that's where the name actually comes from, even though the f turns into a silent h in Spanish and iron becomes hierro, but I just couldn't see that word without picturing little ferrets running around in the store

I always picture having to go past rows and rows of freestanding black iron railings and being forced to ask for wimpy little nickel nails

Last night I found out that the Chinese for black tea is "red tea".

I'm sure that's where the name actually comes from, even though the f turns into a silent h in Spanish and iron becomes hierro

Is this a regional thing? I know "fierro" (Mexican Spanish).

It's a pretty widespread consonant shift in Spanish when compared to other romance languages:

Eg hacer, hormiga, harto, if you swap the h out for an f you get pretty close to most of their cognates.

cigarette in welsh is "ffag".

Ah - Wordrefernce.com tells me that iron = "hierro," except in Latin America, where it's "fierro."

in french, the letter Y is called "i grec", which means "greek i"

In Spanish, too! "i griega"

It's weird that "ll" (doble ele (double el)) is a letter (as in one single letter) in the Spanish alphabet.

The real academia recently changed the name of y from y griega to 'ye'; though the Spanish speaking world has yet to take much notice.

Also, the Spanish double consonants (ch, rr and ll) are no longer listed separately in dictionaries. More's the pity.

In English, double u is a single letter!

In French a w is not a double u it is a double v (which makes more sense, when you look at the letter)

In English, double u is a single letter!

I know, but it is one character, it's two parts joined. Double L is not. It makes a difference to me.

Is "ch" a letter? I can't remember. What about "rr"?

'lawyer' and 'avocado' are the same word in french

It's kind of annoying when you want a good lawyer salad and they mess it up.

Is "ch" a letter? I can't remember. What about "rr"?

Pretty sure they had official letter status until around the mid-90s, when someone realised that it was stupid.

I dunno if this counts itt but when Afrikaans speakers see something cute like a fluffy kitten they go "SHAME!!" It means cute somehow.

I learned a good one in Greek class tonight: agreed (as in, "we should go to the pub tonight!" "Agreed!") is συμφώνη, which is pronounced like symphony -- though with stress on the second syllable. Greek can be pretty cool.

I suppose the roots of that would mean something like 'same sound', no? Very nice!