What is awesome in German?
Tim Wescott
Numerous smart-ass answers leaped to mind, including "idiomatic", "Anne-
Sophie Mutter", "Katerina Witt", etc.
But I thought perhaps he meant "what German idiom means the same as the
US idiom 'awesome'?"
Anyone know? Jeorg?
Jamie
Maybe..
Richard Rasker
Apparently "Hammer!" is the most appropriate translation, followed
by "(echt|super|affen-) geil.
(Warning: "geil" in German also means "horny")
Richard Rasker
--
http://www.linetec.nl
Helmut Sennewald
news:VfudnRLBqfijppXW...@web-ster.com...
Hello Tim,
I looked in a dictionary in the Internet and was surprised that the
meaning of "awesome" in the US is very different from the meaning in
England.
awesome in the US: fantastisch, gro�artig. stark, toll
awesome in England: ehrf�rchtig, schrecklich
Best regards,
Helmut
Germany
christofire
"Helmut Sennewald" <helmuts...@t-online.de> wrote in message
news:he9f72$917$01$1...@news.t-online.com...
In the UK nowadays the expression 'awesome' is recognised by (some) adults
as an imported, fashionable, over-used way of saying 'good'. The original
meaning has probably been de-valued by the new wave.
Chris
Frank Buss
> Tim Wescott wrote:
>> Just got a text from my kid "What is awesome in German?"
>>
>> Numerous smart-ass answers leaped to mind, including "idiomatic", "Anne-
>> Sophie Mutter", "Katerina Witt", etc.
But then the question would be "What is awesome in Germany?", not German?
> ehrf�rchtig
This is not very often used.
In general it depends on the context. Anne-Sophie Mutter, Bach, Max Planck,
Albert Einstein etc. is "gro�artig" and "fantastisch", Katerina Witt is
"toll" (maybe "gro�artig", too, if you like figure skating) and the Cologne
Cathedral can be "ehrfurchtgebietend".
--
Frank Buss, f...@frank-buss.de
http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de
wolfgang
wrote:
> "Tim Wescott" <t...@seemywebsite.com> schrieb im Newsbeitragnews:VfudnRLBqfijppXW...@web-ster.com...
>
> > Just got a text from my kid "What is awesome in German?"
>
> > Numerous smart-ass answers leaped to mind, including "idiomatic", "Anne-
> > Sophie Mutter", "Katerina Witt", etc.
>
> > But I thought perhaps he meant "what German idiom means the same as the
> > US idiom 'awesome'?"
>
> > Anyone know? Jeorg?
>
> > --
> >www.wescottdesign.com
>
> Hello Tim,
>
> I looked in a dictionary in the Internet and was surprised that the
> meaning of "awesome" in the US is very different from the meaning in
> England.
>
>
> awesome in England: ehrfürchtig, schrecklich
>
> www.leo.org
>
> http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende〈=de&searchLoc=0&cmpType=relaxed&...
>
> Best regards,
> Helmut
> Germany
Methinks that the German expression "spitze" probably conveys the idea
that the word "awesome" does in North America, at the colloquial
level.
Translated "spitze" means "point", eg. "die Spitze am Pfeil" means
"the point on the arrow".
Colloquially both words, "spitze" in German and "awesome" in North
America are used to describe the pinnacle of admiration.
Wolfgang
Tim Wescott
> "Tim Wescott" <t...@seemywebsite.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
> news:VfudnRLBqfijppXW...@web-ster.com...
>> Just got a text from my kid "What is awesome in German?"
>>
>> Numerous smart-ass answers leaped to mind, including "idiomatic",
>> "Anne- Sophie Mutter", "Katerina Witt", etc.
>>
>> But I thought perhaps he meant "what German idiom means the same as the
>> US idiom 'awesome'?"
>>
>> Anyone know? Jeorg?
>>
>> --
>> www.wescottdesign.com
>
>
> Hello Tim,
>
> I looked in a dictionary in the Internet and was surprised that the
> meaning of "awesome" in the US is very different from the meaning in
> England.
>
>
> awesome in the US: fantastisch, großartig. stark, toll
>
> awesome in England: ehrfürchtig, schrecklich
>
> www.leo.org
>
> http://dict.leo.org/ende?
lp=ende&lang=de&searchLoc=0&cmpType=relaxed§Hdr=on&spellToler=on&chinese=both&pinyin=diacritic&search=awesome&relink=on
>
Thanks Helmut. The denotation of "Awesome" has retained it's original
meaning, but really correct usage is fairly idiomatic -- hence, I needed
someone more bilingual than me to help out.
Jake
> US idiom 'awesome'?"
Geil..
Supergeil
John Larkin
Brits say "brilliant" to mean "good", whereas we USers use it to mean
"extremely intelligent or creative." Someone called one of my actions
"brilliant", and I took it to be a great compliment, when it was
actually a very mild one. I think.
John
krw
Or perhaps you swapped resistors again. ;-)
Jerry Avins
In its literal meaning, ehrfürchtig. (Akin to frightening. Awestruck is
ehrfürcht.) In the kiddie slang meaning of "marvelous", I suppose
wunderbar is best, although wundervoll, herrlich, and großartig also work.
Jerry
--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
Joerg
> Tim Wescott wrote:
>> Just got a text from my kid "What is awesome in German?"
>>
>> Numerous smart-ass answers leaped to mind, including "idiomatic", "Anne-
>> Sophie Mutter", "Katerina Witt", etc.
>>
>> But I thought perhaps he meant "what German idiom means the same as
>> the US idiom 'awesome'?"
>>
>> Anyone know? Jeorg?
>
> In its literal meaning, ehrfürchtig. (Akin to frightening. Awestruck is
> ehrfürcht.) In the kiddie slang meaning of "marvelous", I suppose
> wunderbar is best, although wundervoll, herrlich, and großartig also work.
>
Pretty much. And also the words Frank mentioned. However, Americans
visiting Germany will soon learn that younger people there use
expressions such as "cool" instead of "wunderbar" :-)
From UK guys I mostly heard "smashing".
--
Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.
Spehro Pefhany
<inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>Jerry Avins wrote:
>> Tim Wescott wrote:
>>> Just got a text from my kid "What is awesome in German?"
>>>
>>> Numerous smart-ass answers leaped to mind, including "idiomatic", "Anne-
>>> Sophie Mutter", "Katerina Witt", etc.
>>>
>>> But I thought perhaps he meant "what German idiom means the same as
>>> the US idiom 'awesome'?"
>>>
>>> Anyone know? Jeorg?
>>
>> In its literal meaning, ehrf�rchtig. (Akin to frightening. Awestruck is
>> ehrf�rcht.) In the kiddie slang meaning of "marvelous", I suppose
>> wunderbar is best, although wundervoll, herrlich, and gro�artig also work.
>>
>
>Pretty much. And also the words Frank mentioned. However, Americans
>visiting Germany will soon learn that younger people there use
>expressions such as "cool" instead of "wunderbar" :-)
I mostly hear "sick" from the resident teen these days.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sick
They also have an annoying habit of saying "true" to mean "I
understand you".
> From UK guys I mostly heard "smashing".
"Brilliant" (different from/to the US/Canadian meaning):
http://www.englishbaby.com/vocab/word/2224
And, not to be left out, wot with their peaceful rise and all, in
Chinese we have a couple of words that translate literally into a
reference to the genitalia of a female ruminant.
Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
--
"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
sp...@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
Rune Allnor
wrote:
> And, not to be left out, wot with their peaceful rise and all, in
> Chinese we have a couple of words that translate literally into a
> reference to the genitalia of a female ruminant.
I went to college in a different part of the country than where
I grew up, so I spoke a quite different dialect than the locals
in my college town. One day some of my classmates, who were local
to the college town, and I went to see some comedians who spoke
my dialect.
Now, Norwegian dialects differ in that people use more or less
the same vocabulary and mostly the same grammar, but pronounce
the words rather differently. Which means that spoken words can
be misinterpreted across dialects, since one word is pronounced
in one dialect the same way as a totally different word in the
other dialect.
So these guys, a comedian + straight-man, talked for about half
an hour about what everybody but me thought to be "fettsuging" -
liposuction. And they had a blast on stage, but no one in the
>2000 crowd had the faintest clue why. I stood there, lauging,
among my friends who, like the rest of the crosd, didn't have
a clue what was so funny.
I eventually had to explain to my friends that "fett", Eng. "fat,
grease", when pronounced as in 'standard' Norwegian in the dialect
of the comedians means female genitalia. All of a sudden my
friends locked on to the comedy of the guys on stage.
Transposed to English, my freinds had a similar revelation as
somebody would have when made aware that the comedians did not,
as first appearances might have suggested, discuss feline pets.
Rune
Stupendous Man
antiques, i came a cross a crystal Seder set she bought in Germany in the
early 50s, that was old then. Translation of the etched words on Babelfish
gives me nothing that has any meaning.
The jug says
"dieser krug ist gemacht dak man judbelt und lacht doch in geheimer kammer
schlaft katzenjammer"
on glasses it says,
"bei speil und bier schmeckt's pfeifchen mir"
Anyone know what it means?
--
Stupendous Man,
Defender of Freedom, Advocate of Liberty
pyotr filipivich
or about Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:43:22 -0000 did write/type or cause to
appear in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:
And it started as a good English word, to describe something as
inspiring Awe in a person. Such as an Awesome Church.
tschus
pyotr
-
pyotr filipivich
We will drink no whiskey before its nine.
It's eight fifty eight. Close enough!
pyotr filipivich
Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:08:37 -0800 (PST) did write/type or cause to
appear in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:
ROFLMAO.
Like the time the comic talked about being black and Jewish,
"...showing off my bris scar .." and I was the only one who laughed.
pyotr filipivich
21 Nov 2009 16:36:37 -0500 did write/type or cause to appear in
rec.crafts.metalworking the following:
>Tim Wescott wrote:
>> Just got a text from my kid "What is awesome in German?"
>>
>> Numerous smart-ass answers leaped to mind, including "idiomatic", "Anne-
>> Sophie Mutter", "Katerina Witt", etc.
>>
>> But I thought perhaps he meant "what German idiom means the same as the
>> US idiom 'awesome'?"
>>
>> Anyone know? Jeorg?
>
>ehrf�rcht.) In the kiddie slang meaning of "marvelous", I suppose
>wunderbar is best, although wundervoll, herrlich, and gro�artig also work.
'ausgeseit' was the hip term when I was in Germany. I thought it
was a neologism from the American "out of sight, man!" till I saw it
in one of the Real Papers.
>
>Jerry
Jim Wilkins
> While we are on the subject, while cleaning out Mom's house and identifying
> antiques, i came a cross a crystal Seder set she bought in Germany in the
> early 50s, that was old then. Translation of the etched words on Babelfish
> gives me nothing that has any meaning.
>
> The jug says
>
> "dieser krug ist gemacht
> dak man judbelt und lacht
> doch in geheimer kammer
> schlaft katzenjammer"
>
> on glasses it says,
>
> "bei speil und bier
> schmeckt's pfeifchen mir"
>
> Anyone know what it means?
>
> Defender of Freedom, Advocate of Liberty
I reformatted them to show the rhyme.
Does the 'k' in dak look like a Greek beta? Judbelt makes sense as
jubelt, a verb related to jubilee.
The dictionary says 'speil' is Austrian for a skewer, as in shish-
kabob?,
With skewer and beer tastes (good) the little pipe to me.
This mug is made
That one celebrates and laughs
Then in a hidden room
Sleeps off the hangover
Much is lost in translation.
jsw
Jerry Avins
> While we are on the subject, while cleaning out Mom's house and
> identifying antiques, i came a cross a crystal Seder set she bought in
> Germany in the early 50s, that was old then. Translation of the etched
> words on Babelfish gives me nothing that has any meaning.
>
>
> The jug says
>
> "dieser krug ist gemacht dak man judbelt und lacht doch in geheimer
> kammer schlaft katzenjammer"
This jug is made [dak judbelt?] and laughs, yet a cat's chorus (i.e.,
cacaphony) sleeps in a secret room. /I don't get it at all/
> on glasses it says,
>
> "bei speil und bier schmeckt's pfeifchen mir"
With playing [music] and beer, the taste makes me whistle.
> Anyone know what it means?
I can only guess, but I can tell you that it is German, not Yiddish.
�����������������������������������������������������������������������
Jim Wilkins
> .....
>
> And it started as a good English word, to describe something as
> inspiring Awe in a person. Such as an Awesome Church.
>
> tschus
> pyotr
I've heard that Ivan the Terrible could also be translated Ivan the
Awesome.
Awesome is one of the definitions for grozniy in my Russian
dictionary.
jsw
Doug Miller
>While we are on the subject, while cleaning out Mom's house and identifying
>antiques, i came a cross a crystal Seder set she bought in Germany in the
>early 50s, that was old then. Translation of the etched words on Babelfish
>gives me nothing that has any meaning.
>The jug says
>
>"dieser krug ist gemacht dak man judbelt und lacht doch in geheimer kammer
>schlaft katzenjammer"
More likely "da�" instead of "dak", and "jubelt" instead of "judbelt". With
those substitutions made, as far as I can tell the gist of it is
"This jug is made for you to rejoice and laugh, but in the privacy of your
room lurks a hangover."
>on glasses it says,
>
>"bei speil und bier schmeckt's pfeifchen mir"
"speil" or "Spiel" ? (Capitalization makes a difference, by the way -- English
capitalizes only proper nouns, but German capitalizes *all* nouns.)
Not sure about this one, but I think the general sense is one of enjoying a
smoke (pipe) and a beer while playing games. Assuming that says "Spiel", not
"speil". "Speil" is a wood-splitting wedge.
Jim Wilkins
Or speil is really spiel, playing (cards, etc).
jsw
Jerry Avins
Does what you wrote as "dak" actually appear as "daβ"? (view in unicode)
Then it's
This mug is made
so that one rejoices and laughs ...
At first, I read "speil" as "speil", which translated to "play" in many
senses. Sorry!
Jim Wilkins
> was a neologism from the American "out of sight, man!" till I saw it
> in one of the Real Papers.
It could be Denglisch (Deutsch + Englisch), There is a surprising
amount of it in the German-language edition of Daimler's house
publication "HighTechReport".
Ausgezeichnet = Outstanding!
jsw
Tim Wescott
> Let the Record show that "christofire" <chris...@btinternet.com> on
> or about Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:43:22 -0000 did write/type or cause to
> appear in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:
>>
>>"Helmut Sennewald" <helmuts...@t-online.de> wrote in message
>>news:he9f72$917$01$1...@news.t-online.com...
>>> "Tim Wescott" <t...@seemywebsite.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
>>> news:VfudnRLBqfijppXW...@web-ster.com...
>>>> Just got a text from my kid "What is awesome in German?"
>>>>
>>>> Numerous smart-ass answers leaped to mind, including "idiomatic",
>>>> "Anne- Sophie Mutter", "Katerina Witt", etc.
>>>>
>>>> But I thought perhaps he meant "what German idiom means the same as
>>>> the US idiom 'awesome'?"
>>>>
>>>> Anyone know? Jeorg?
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> www.wescottdesign.com
>>>
>>>
>>> Hello Tim,
>>>
>>> I looked in a dictionary in the Internet and was surprised that the
>>> meaning of "awesome" in the US is very different from the meaning in
>>> England.
>>>
>>>
>>> awesome in the US: fantastisch, großartig. stark, toll
>>>
>>> awesome in England: ehrfürchtig, schrecklich
>>>
>>> www.leo.org
>>>
>>> http://dict.leo.org/ende?
lp=ende&lang=de&searchLoc=0&cmpType=relaxed§Hdr=on&spellToler=on&chinese=both&pinyin=diacritic&search=awesome&relink=on
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>> Helmut
>>> Germany
>>
>>
>>In the UK nowadays the expression 'awesome' is recognised by (some)
>>adults as an imported, fashionable, over-used way of saying 'good'. The
>>original meaning has probably been de-valued by the new wave.
>
> And it started as a good English word, to describe something as
> inspiring Awe in a person. Such as an Awesome Church.
Apparently this was also the original meaning of "awful" -- that one sure
has shifted meaning.
Stupendous Man
>>"dieser krug ist gemacht dak man judbelt und lacht doch in geheimer kammer
>>schlaft katzenjammer"
>
> those substitutions made, as far as I can tell the gist of it is
It looks like a K to me, but have a look,
http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd236/arborigine/JugScript.jpg
http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd236/arborigine/SederSet.jpg
Thanks for , all my siblings want this set, but none of us know anything
about it, and aren't of the Jewish faith.
pyotr filipivich
Sat, 21 Nov 2009 18:35:49 -0800 (PST) did write/type or cause to
appear in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:
>> .....
>>
>> � � � � And it started as a good English word, to describe something as
>> inspiring Awe in a person. �Such as an Awesome Church.
>>
>> tschus
>> pyotr
>
>I've heard that Ivan the Terrible could also be translated Ivan the
>Awesome.
Terrible not as in "bad" but in "Dread and Terrible Lord" - you do
not cross this person.
One text I read had him as "John the Dread" - which would be a
translation of his name.
>
>Awesome is one of the definitions for grozniy in my Russian
>dictionary.
Ivan Groznik, Tsar of all Russians.
pyotr filipivich
Sat, 21 Nov 2009 18:55:12 -0800 (PST) did write/type or cause to
appear in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:
Ja, was er sagte! I couldn't remember how to spell after all
these years.
It makes it difficult to look things up, when I can't get the
spelling correct.
tschus
pyotr
Tim Williams
news:7mrrd6F...@mid.individual.net...
>> More likely "da�" instead of "dak", and "jubelt" instead of "judbelt".
>> those substitutions made, as far as I can tell the gist of it is
>
> It looks like a K to me, but have a look,
> http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd236/arborigine/JugScript.jpg
> http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd236/arborigine/SederSet.jpg
Ah yes, I remember that's one of the forms of "�", which is "s-z ligature".
In this form you can see the "long-s" (like a math integral sign, same root)
and "z" together much better than in the evolved form that looks like
"beta".
I'd say it's a fine set to share beer and enjoyment with, looks nice.
Tim, decidedly not a German expert
--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms
Tim Wescott
>>>"dieser krug ist gemacht dak man judbelt und lacht doch in geheimer
>>>kammer schlaft katzenjammer"
>>
>> More likely "daß" instead of "dak", and "jubelt" instead of "judbelt".
>> With
>> those substitutions made, as far as I can tell the gist of it is
>
> It looks like a K to me, but have a look,
> http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd236/arborigine/JugScript.jpg
> http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd236/arborigine/SederSet.jpg
>
> Thanks for , all my siblings want this set, but none of us know anything
> about it, and aren't of the Jewish faith.
It's "daß" with a fancy eszett, not a 'k'. Gothic German can be hand to
decipher if you're not used to it.
Helmut Sennewald
> On Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:01:47 -0800, Stupendous Man wrote:
>
>>>>"dieser krug ist gemacht dak man judbelt und lacht doch in geheimer
>>>>kammer schlaft katzenjammer"
>>>
>>> With
>>> those substitutions made, as far as I can tell the gist of it is
>>
>> It looks like a K to me, but have a look,
>> http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd236/arborigine/JugScript.jpg
>> http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd236/arborigine/SederSet.jpg
>>
>> Thanks for , all my siblings want this set, but none of us know anything
>> about it, and aren't of the Jewish faith.
>
Hello,
I have it, in German. Let's hope you understand my translation.
Dieser Krug ist gemacht,
dass man jubelt und lacht.
Doch in geheimer Kammer,
schl�ft der Katzenjammer.
This pitcher is made,
to make people laugh and chear.
But on the q.t., (But in private)
sleeps the hangover
The last sentence means that the next day the hangover will come.
Best regards,
Helmut
A German in Germany
Helmut Sennewald
news:heb3th$68b$03$1...@news.t-online.com...
> "Tim Wescott" <t...@seemywebsite.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
> news:pdudnebSoZaOVZXW...@web-ster.com...
>> On Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:01:47 -0800, Stupendous Man wrote:
>>
>>>>>"dieser krug ist gemacht dak man judbelt und lacht doch in geheimer
>>>>>kammer schlaft katzenjammer"
>>>>
>>>> More likely "da�" instead of "dak", and "jubelt" instead of "judbelt".
>>>> With
>>>> those substitutions made, as far as I can tell the gist of it is
>>>
>>> It looks like a K to me, but have a look,
>>> http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd236/arborigine/JugScript.jpg
>>> http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd236/arborigine/SederSet.jpg
>>>
>>> Thanks for , all my siblings want this set, but none of us know anything
>>> about it, and aren't of the Jewish faith.
>>
>> It's "da�" with a fancy eszett, not a 'k'. Gothic German can be hand to
>> decipher if you're not used to it.
>>
>> --
>> www.wescottdesign.com
>
>
Hello again,
My wife corrected the sentence with the hangover.
I also forgot the sentence on the small glasses, schnappsglas (shot glass?).
---
Dieser Krug ist gemacht,
dass man jubelt und lacht.
Doch in geheimer Kammer,
schl�ft der Katzenjammer.
This pitcher is made,
to make people laugh and chear.
But on the q.t., (But in private)
the hangover sleeps.
The last sentence means that the next day the hangover will come.
---
Bei Spiel und Bier,
schmeckt das Pfeifchen mir.
When playing cards and drinking beer,
I enjoy smoking a pipe.
Jan Panteltje
Sennewald" <helmuts...@t-online.de> wrote in
<heb3th$68b$03$1...@news.t-online.com>:
>Hello,
>
>I have it, in German. Let's hope you understand my translation.
>
>Dieser Krug ist gemacht,
>dass man jubelt und lacht.
>Doch in geheimer Kammer,
>schl�ft der Katzenjammer.
>
>
>This pitcher is made,
>to make people laugh and chear.
>But on the q.t., (But in private)
>sleeps the hangover
Maybe better: 'But in a secret place waits the hangover'?
Jim Wilkins
wrote:
> "Helmut Sennewald" <helmutsennew...@t-online.de> schrieb im Newsbeitragnews:heb3th$68b$03$1...@news.t-online.com...
>
>
>
>
>
> > "Tim Wescott" <t...@seemywebsite.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
> >news:pdudnebSoZaOVZXW...@web-ster.com...
> >> On Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:01:47 -0800, Stupendous Man wrote:
>
> >>>>>"dieser krug ist gemacht dak man judbelt und lacht doch in geheimer
> >>>>>kammer schlaft katzenjammer"
>
> >>>> With
> >>>> those substitutions made, as far as I can tell the gist of it is
>
> >>> It looks like a K to me, but have a look,
> >>>http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd236/arborigine/JugScript.jpg
> >>>http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd236/arborigine/SederSet.jpg
>
> >>> Thanks for , all my siblings want this set, but none of us know anything
> >>> about it, and aren't of the Jewish faith.
>
> >> decipher if you're not used to it.
>
> >> --
> >>www.wescottdesign.com
>
> Hello again,
>
> My wife corrected the sentence with the hangover.
> I also forgot the sentence on the small glasses, schnappsglas (shot glass?).
>
> ---
> Dieser Krug ist gemacht,
> dass man jubelt und lacht.
> Doch in geheimer Kammer,
>
> This pitcher is made,
> to make people laugh and chear.
> But on the q.t., (But in private)
> the hangover sleeps.
>
> The last sentence means that the next day the hangover will come.
> Best regards,
> Helmut
> A German in Germany-
So what exactly does "sleeps in the secret chamber" imply in English?
Is it from a poem?
Properly translating these "winged phrases" with obscured meanings
becomes important when politicians say them, for example Putin's "to
wet in the outhouse". i.e. to murder someone.
jsw
Uwe Bonnes
Probably 'geheim' is better translated to 'private' and perhaps the last two
lines translated to:
But in the private chamber
hangover lingers
Uwe Bonnes b...@elektron.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de
Institut fuer Kernphysik Schlossgartenstrasse 9 64289 Darmstadt
--------- Tel. 06151 162516 -------- Fax. 06151 164321 ----------
Jan Panteltje
<b...@elektron.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de> wrote in
<hebcgc$og4$1...@lnx107.hrz.tu-darmstadt.de>:
>In comp.dsp Jan Panteltje <pNaonSt...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> On a sunny day (Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:31:10 +0100) it happened "Helmut
>> Sennewald" <helmuts...@t-online.de> wrote in
>> <heb3th$68b$03$1...@news.t-online.com>:
>
>> >Hello,
>> >
>> >I have it, in German. Let's hope you understand my translation.
>> >
>> >Dieser Krug ist gemacht,
>> >dass man jubelt und lacht.
>> >Doch in geheimer Kammer,
>> >schlï¿œft der Katzenjammer.
>> >
>> >
>> >This pitcher is made,
>> >to make people laugh and chear.
>> >But on the q.t., (But in private)
>> >sleeps the hangover
>
>> Maybe better: 'But in a secret place waits the hangover'?
>Probably 'geheim' is better translated to 'private' and perhaps the last two
>lines translated to:
>But in the private chamber
>hangover lingers
Ah, 'geheimer Kammer' is the BRAIN!
Of course (its old German slang)!
The only secret place is your head :-)
But in the head the hangover lingers?
But in the head the hangover waits?
?
Jerry Avins
It is the glyph "ess-tzet" (s-z) in the old typeface. In modern
typeface, a Greek lower-case beta (�) is used, and lacking that, ss. The
word is either da� or dass. It means "that". I think that's a drinking
set, not originally for a seder.
Jerry
--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
�����������������������������������������������������������������������
Greegor
Were you talking about this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5RU6x_GGbc
Lenge' Livre Norge' - from Iowa, USA
Stupendous Man
> a Greek lower-case beta (�) is used, and lacking that, ss. The word is
> either da� or dass. It means "that". I think that's a drinking set, not
> originally for a seder.
That could be, I only based that idea on the Star of David in the etching.
The mystery seems to be solved, Thanks to you guys.
Mom worked for US Army Intelligence in Heidelberg after the war and used
some of her pay to buy antiques. I have a lot china to deal with, Delft,
Meissen, Rosenthal, etc., Hummels, and quite a few Steins, about half are
crystal.
Doug Miller
>
>>>"dieser krug ist gemacht dak man judbelt und lacht doch in geheimer kammer
>>>schlaft katzenjammer"
>>
>> those substitutions made, as far as I can tell the gist of it is
>
>It looks like a K to me, but have a look,
>http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd236/arborigine/JugScript.jpg
Yep, that's an ess-tset �, not a k.
>http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd236/arborigine/SederSet.jpg
And "Spiel", not "speil".
>
>Thanks for , all my siblings want this set, but none of us know anything
>about it, and aren't of the Jewish faith.
Hate to break it to you... but this isn't a Seder set. There's no religious
meaning to either of the inscriptions. Might have been *used* as a Seder set,
but that's definitely not what it was made for. It was made for drinking --
and enjoying it.
Wes
>Just got a text from my kid "What is awesome in German?"
I've waited until you got proper answers but the first thing that popped into my head was
"Funkengrooven". ;)
Wes
syoung
> Just got a text from my kid "What is awesome in German?"
>
> Sophie Mutter", "Katerina Witt", etc.
>
> But I thought perhaps he meant "what German idiom means the same as the
> US idiom 'awesome'?"
>
> Anyone know? Jeorg?
>
christofire
"syoung" <syo...@nospam.net> wrote in message
news:bolOm.31078$ZF3....@newsfe13.iad...
und kein Fehler!
Larry Jaques
<clu...@lycos.com> scrawled the following:
Farfurgnookie, German for "gettin' some in a VW"?
--
We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond
with them. -- Abigail Adams, letter to John Adams, 1774
pyotr filipivich
about Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:10:54 -0600 did write/type or cause to
appear in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:
>
>Sophie Mutter", "Katerina Witt", etc.
>
>But I thought perhaps he meant "what German idiom means the same as the
>US idiom 'awesome'?"
"Wunderbar"- although a lot of that is in the inflection.
Your girlfriend is coming over for the weekend. Wunderbar!
She wants to visit your mother. Wunderbar.
John O'Flaherty
>Let the Record show that "christofire" <chris...@btinternet.com> on
>or about Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:43:22 -0000 did write/type or cause to
>appear in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:
>>
>>"Helmut Sennewald" <helmuts...@t-online.de> wrote in message
>>news:he9f72$917$01$1...@news.t-online.com...
>>> "Tim Wescott" <t...@seemywebsite.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
>>> news:VfudnRLBqfijppXW...@web-ster.com...
>>>> Just got a text from my kid "What is awesome in German?"
>>>>
>>>> Numerous smart-ass answers leaped to mind, including "idiomatic", "Anne-
>>>> Sophie Mutter", "Katerina Witt", etc.
>>>>
>>>> But I thought perhaps he meant "what German idiom means the same as the
>>>> US idiom 'awesome'?"
>>>>
>>>> Anyone know? Jeorg?
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> www.wescottdesign.com
>>>
>>>
>>> Hello Tim,
>>>
>>> I looked in a dictionary in the Internet and was surprised that the
>>> meaning of "awesome" in the US is very different from the meaning in
>>> England.
>>>
>>>
>>> awesome in the US: fantastisch, gro�artig. stark, toll
>>>
>>> awesome in England: ehrf�rchtig, schrecklich
>>>
>>> www.leo.org
>>>
>>> http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende&lang=de&searchLoc=0&cmpType=relaxed§Hdr=on&spellToler=on&chinese=both&pinyin=diacritic&search=awesome&relink=on
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>> Helmut
>>> Germany
>>
>>
>>In the UK nowadays the expression 'awesome' is recognised by (some) adults
>>as an imported, fashionable, over-used way of saying 'good'. The original
>>meaning has probably been de-valued by the new wave.
>
> And it started as a good English word, to describe something as
>inspiring Awe in a person. Such as an Awesome Church.
It's really terrific how words evolve.
--
John
Jerry Avins
...
> It's really terrific how words evolve.
That's great (i.e., large).
�����������������������������������������������������������������������
Stormin Mormon
Krew up in Chermany (vatt she schaze). I will do my best to
remember to print this off, and go ask her.
--
Christopher A. Young
Learn more about Jesus
www.lds.org
.
"Stupendous Man" <sp...@trap.com> wrote in message
news:7mrj94F...@mid.individual.net...
While we are on the subject, while cleaning out Mom's house
and identifying
antiques, i came a cross a crystal Seder set she bought in
Germany in the
early 50s, that was old then. Translation of the etched
words on Babelfish
gives me nothing that has any meaning.
The jug says
"dieser krug ist gemacht dak man judbelt und lacht doch in
geheimer kammer
schlaft katzenjammer"
on glasses it says,
"bei speil und bier schmeckt's pfeifchen mir"
Anyone know what it means?
--
Stormin Mormon
old German type. I near to collapsed, laughing.
The one with the beer glass and stick figure "Farfrumpuking"
When my family was in German town, my sister had been
studying German in school. Mom asked her what a sign said
"Frozen Yoghurt". Sure enough, we all looked, and in English
but German type face, that's what it said.
--
Christopher A. Young
Learn more about Jesus
www.lds.org
.
"Wes" <clu...@lycos.com> wrote in message
news:oUjOm.232361$Xw3.2...@en-nntp-04.dc1.easynews.com...
Stormin Mormon
sung for years.
--
Christopher A. Young
Learn more about Jesus
www.lds.org
.
"John O'Flaherty" <quia...@yeeha.com> wrote in message
news:700lg594gorqt4c8g...@4ax.com...
Rich Grise
> On Nov 21, 2:31�pm, "Helmut Sennewald" <helmutsennew...@t-online.de>
>> "Tim Wescott" <t...@seemywebsite.com> schrieb im
>> Newsbeitragnews:VfudnRLBqfijppXW...@web-ster.com...
>>
>>
>> > "Anne- Sophie Mutter", "Katerina Witt", etc.
>>
>> > But I thought perhaps he meant "what German idiom means the same as
>> > the US idiom 'awesome'?"
>>
>> > Anyone know? �Jeorg?
>>
>> meaning of "awesome" in the US is very different from the meaning in
>> England.
>>
>> awesome in the US: fantastisch, gro�artig. stark, toll
>>
>> awesome in England: ehrf�rchtig, schrecklich
>>
>> www.leo.org
>>
>
> Methinks that the German expression "spitze" probably conveys the idea
> that the word "awesome" does in North America, at the colloquial level.
>
> Translated "spitze" means "point", eg. "die Spitze am Pfeil" means "the
> point on the arrow".
>
> Colloquially both words, "spitze" in German and "awesome" in North America
> are used to describe the pinnacle of admiration.
>
I think he meant "awesome" as in a busload of preppies going off a cliff.... ;-)
Cheers!
Rich
Marte Schwarz
> Ursula, 80 + years old, lives across the street from me.
May be she can remember this :-)
> antiques, i came a cross a crystal Seder set she bought in
> Germany in the early 50s, that was old then.
Must have been very old even in the early 50th.
> Translation of the etched words on Babelfish
> gives me nothing that has any meaning.
Thats because it is not actual german. This kind of german was either spoken
few hundred years ago or it is kind of a very special patois.
I'll give a try - and hopely I'm better than Babelfish :-)
> "dieser krug ist gemacht dak man judbelt und lacht doch in
this pitcher is made for rejoice and laughing. But in
> geheimer kammer schlaft katzenjammer"
secret chamber (behind the doors in private flats) sleeps hangover
> "bei speil und bier schmeckt's pfeifchen mir"
The meaning of "speil" is not clear for me. Could be game or in former
german it was used for suckling pig roasted over a fire. I guess the
suckling pig is meant here.
(sitting) by suckling and beer I enjoy smoking my pipe.
Regards
Marte
Jim Wilkins
> Hi,...
>
> > Translation of the etched words on Babelfish
> > gives me nothing that has any meaning.
>
> Thats because it is not actual german. This kind of german was either spoken
> few hundred years ago or it is kind of a very special patois.
>
I lived in Heidelberg for a while, then Heilbronn (near Stuttgart)
where they speak Schwaebisch instead of comprehensible German. Even in
cosmopolitan Heidelberg some of the locals had a thick accent, for
instance one gave me directions across the old bridge as "uba da
brick".
Clocks and crockery with those cutesy slang sayings filled the gift
shops, apparently for local rather than tourist consumption since many
celebrated "memories of my (military) service time". I didn't ask when
or where.
Thanks to either Nixon's cutback or my two years learning German I
went there instead of Vietnam, and as a network repairman drove
around alone quite a bit and needed to talk to the locals and
Bundespost (phone line) personnel.
How do you say "intermodulation distortion" in German? I got them to
correct the line equalization to work with our Bell 202 type modems
but it took a while.
Very few GIs really liked the place; several of my friends re-upped in
order to return to Saigon.
jsw
Marte Schwarz
> I lived in Heidelberg for a while, then Heilbronn (near Stuttgart)
> where they speak Schwaebisch instead of comprehensible German.
We know this ;-) A heavy discussed slogan for Baden-W�rttemberg is "Wir
k�nnen alles - nur kein hochdeutsch" I'll Try in english "Yes we can, but
not regular german" (J�rg, hab ich das einigerma�en richtig wiedergegeben?)
> "uba da brick". Don't worry, even the Schwaben have different languages
> all called "Schw�bisch" but as different that the one from Heilbronn may
> have troubles with someone from behind Biberach :-) (only two hours by
> car)
How do you say "intermodulation distortion" in German?
Intermodulationsverzerrung
Marte
Eric Jacobsen
> Hi Jim,
>
>> I lived in Heidelberg for a while, then Heilbronn (near Stuttgart)
>> where they speak Schwaebisch instead of comprehensible German.
>
> k�ｿｽnnen alles - nur kein hochdeutsch" I'll Try in english "Yes we can, but
> not regular german" (J�ｿｽrg, hab ich das einigerma�ｿｽen richtig wiedergegeben?)
I lived in Ludwisgburg, near Stuttgart, for a few years when I was a
teenager. I was trying to learn German, mostly by osmosis and some
schooling, and often when I'd try to talk to people I'd get quizzical
looks like I was a space alien. It often turned out I was trying to mix
Schwabisch and Hochdeutch in ways that just didn't work very well. ;)
I'll take a crack at the phrase you quoted, which does seem pretty funny
knowing the area:
"We can do anything, except proper German."
>> "uba da brick". Don't worry, even the Schwaben have different languages
>> all called "Schw�ｿｽbisch" but as different that the one from Heilbronn may
>> have troubles with someone from behind Biberach :-) (only two hours by
>> car)
>
> How do you say "intermodulation distortion" in German?
>
> Intermodulationsverzerrung
>
> Marte
It's funny that a lot of the non-conversational words that I still
remember are technical stuff like that: vergasser = carburetor,
einspritz = fuel injection. I guess I've always been a car guy. ;)
--
Eric Jacobsen
Minister of Algorithms
Abineau Communications
http://www.abineau.com
Jerry Avins
> On 11/24/2009 12:37 PM, Marte Schwarz wrote:
>> Hi Jim,
>>
>>> I lived in Heidelberg for a while, then Heilbronn (near Stuttgart)
>>> where they speak Schwaebisch instead of comprehensible German.
>>
>> not regular german" (J�rg, hab ich das einigerma�en richtig
>
> I lived in Ludwisgburg, near Stuttgart, for a few years when I was a
> teenager. I was trying to learn German, mostly by osmosis and some
> schooling, and often when I'd try to talk to people I'd get quizzical
> looks like I was a space alien. It often turned out I was trying to mix
> Schwabisch and Hochdeutch in ways that just didn't work very well. ;)
>
> I'll take a crack at the phrase you quoted, which does seem pretty funny
> knowing the area:
>
> "We can do anything, except proper German."
>
>>> "uba da brick". Don't worry, even the Schwaben have different languages
>>> have troubles with someone from behind Biberach :-) (only two hours by
>>> car)
>>
>> How do you say "intermodulation distortion" in German?
>>
>> Intermodulationsverzerrung
>>
>> Marte
>
> It's funny that a lot of the non-conversational words that I still
> remember are technical stuff like that: vergasser = carburetor,
> einspritz = fuel injection. I guess I've always been a car guy. ;)
I never heard the term before, but I understood it before reaching the
translation. After all, seltzer water from a siphon bottle is
colloquially "spritswasser" in Yiddish.
Jim Wilkins
> On 11/24/2009 12:37 PM, Marte Schwarz wrote:
> > Hi Jim,
>
> It's funny that a lot of the non-conversational words that I still
> remember are technical stuff like that: vergasser = carburetor,
> einspritz = fuel injection. I guess I've always been a car guy. ;)
>
> --
> Eric Jacobsen
> Minister of Algorithms
> Abineau Communicationshttp://www.abineau.com
I've waited 36 years for an excuse to drop "Zundverteilerkopf" into a
conversation.
jsw
Rune Allnor
'Verteilerkopf' = 'distributor head' is obvious. Can't
figure out 'Zund' without a dictionary?
Rune
lang...@fonz.dk
it means ignite or set something on fire but I already
knew that zündkerze means sparkplug so it was quite obvious :)
-Lasse
Jim Wilkins
> On 25 Nov, 00:23, Jim Wilkins <kb1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Nov 24, 2:52 pm, Eric Jacobsen <eric.jacob...@ieee.org> wrote:
>
> > > On 11/24/2009 12:37 PM, Marte Schwarz wrote:
> > > > Hi Jim,
> > > ...
>
> > > It's funny that a lot of the non-conversational words that I still
> > > remember are technical stuff like that: vergasser = carburetor,
> > > einspritz = fuel injection. I guess I've always been a car guy. ;)
> > I've waited 36 years for an excuse to drop "Zundverteilerkopf" into a
> > conversation.
>
> 'Verteilerkopf' = 'distributor head' is obvious. Can't
> figure out 'Zund' without a dictionary?
>
> Rune-
It's a plastic distributor cap, I had to learn and correctly pronounce
the names of the numerous parts I bought to maintain my $200 VW and
make it pass the Army's version of the strict TUV inspection. Some
aren't so obvious, headlights are "shine throwers", plugs are "spark
candles", hex nuts are "mothers", especially the rusted ones.
Earlier today I downloaded the instructions for a Jotul wood stove,
with English and Norwegian in parallel down the page but clearly not
literally translated. Knowing some German gave me at least a third of
the Norsk words, enough to figure out most of it. For example
pakninger looks like Packungen, sealing gaskets.
jsw
Rune Allnor
> On Nov 24, 7:03 pm, Rune Allnor <all...@tele.ntnu.no> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On 25 Nov, 00:23, Jim Wilkins <kb1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Nov 24, 2:52 pm, Eric Jacobsen <eric.jacob...@ieee.org> wrote:
>
> > > > On 11/24/2009 12:37 PM, Marte Schwarz wrote:
> > > > > Hi Jim,
> > > > ...
>
> > > > It's funny that a lot of the non-conversational words that I still
> > > > remember are technical stuff like that: vergasser = carburetor,
> > > > einspritz = fuel injection. I guess I've always been a car guy. ;)
> > > > Eric Jacobsen
> > > I've waited 36 years for an excuse to drop "Zundverteilerkopf" into a
> > > conversation.
>
> > 'Verteilerkopf' = 'distributor head' is obvious. Can't
> > figure out 'Zund' without a dictionary?
>
> > Rune-
>
> It's a plastic distributor cap, I had to learn and correctly pronounce
> the names of the numerous parts I bought to maintain my $200 VW and
> make it pass the Army's version of the strict TUV inspection. Some
> aren't so obvious, headlights are "shine throwers",
Norwegian "lyskaster", "lys" = "light", "kaste" = "throw"
> plugs are "spark
> candles",
Norw. "tennplugg", "tenn" = "ignite"
> hex nuts are "mothers", especially the rusted ones.
"Mutter" in Norwegian. There ought to be some
interesting etymology here.
> Earlier today I downloaded the instructions for a Jotul wood stove,
> with English and Norwegian in parallel down the page but clearly not
> literally translated. Knowing some German gave me at least a third of
> the Norsk words, enough to figure out most of it. For example
> pakninger looks like Packungen, sealing gaskets.
Correct.
If you know both German and English, you should be able to
come a long way understanding written Norwegian and Danish,
and presumably also Swedish. The grammar is a simplified
version of the German grammar, words are concatenated
in much the same way as in German, and the vocabulary is
partially Germanic, with increasing amounts of anglicisms.
One trap to be aware of, though, is Norw. "øl" vs German "öl".
The former means "beer", the latter "oil".
Rune
Jim Wilkins
> On 25 Nov, 02:12, Jim Wilkins <kb1...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If you know both German and English, you should be able to
> come a long way understanding written Norwegian and Danish,
> and presumably also Swedish. The grammar is a simplified
> version of the German grammar, words are concatenated
> in much the same way as in German, and the vocabulary is
> partially Germanic, with increasing amounts of anglicisms.
>
Also Dutch, after learning the voiced-unvoiced shifts etc. I can't
really make much sense of Swedish and Finnish is of course impossible.
The US tv show "Buffy" did a comedy cheating-husband scene in
supposedly authentic Old Norse from 900AD that was a parody of bad
foreign films. (The show was basically the ex-Ellen and Roseanne
writers' playground for any rude, wacky humor they felt like and the
network either tolerated or didn't understand, such as making bad puns
in Latin)
The dialog wasn't in the on-line script copy and the subtitles were
intentionally awful, but to me some of the words were recognizably
Germanic and others sounded like Russian.
jsw
Joseph Gwinn
<1ee40b9e-27f1-449a...@r24g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>,
Rune Allnor <all...@tele.ntnu.no> wrote:
[snip]
> If you know both German and English, you should be able to
> come a long way understanding written Norwegian and Danish,
> and presumably also Swedish. The grammar is a simplified
> version of the German grammar, words are concatenated
> in much the same way as in German, and the vocabulary is
> partially Germanic, with increasing amounts of anglicisms.
>
> One trap to be aware of, though, is Norw. "�l" vs German "�l".
> The former means "beer", the latter "oil".
I discovered this while in Sweden, and found it quite amusing. My
pleasant but un-researched theory is that the Vikings called beer "oil"
as a barroom joke, and over the centuries the joke became the standard.
So the Swedes had to invent a term for oil: olja.
Joe Gwinn
Heinrich Wolf
> If you know both German and English, you should be able to
> come a long way understanding written Norwegian and Danish,
> and presumably also Swedish.
Right. While at university, I read an article on the wolverine (Gulo
gulo) in Swedish in a volume on wildlife biology published by the
Swedish Hunter's Association using my knowledge of (southern) German
and English. I found that I have to imagine how the words would sound
when spoken. Meanwhile I studied some Swedish and can read Swedish
newspapers at a somewhat slow pace and think Swedish is much closer to
German than to English. Knowledge of English is useful because other
than the southern and middle German dialects from which Hochdeutsch
mostly evolved (``hoch'' originally refered to height above sea
level), Swedisch and English did not take part in the second sound
shift.
(And to me Swedish and Norwegian seem similar enough that I avoid
reading the second as not to mess them, except for articles that are
of special interest to me.)
> The grammar is a simplified
> version of the German grammar, words are concatenated
> in much the same way as in German, and the vocabulary is
> partially Germanic, with increasing amounts of anglicisms.
I guess grammar is the other way round. German dialects, that still
exist today (and may be spoken by young people who came e.g. from the
Lebanon with their parents) reflect the languages of the Germanic
tribes more than 1000 years ago and construct sentences much simpler
than Hochdeutsch. Hochdeutsch has evolved a lot as the language of
bureaucrats of whom were plenty as there were hundreds of local
governments. Those guys tend to demonstrate their importance by using
a special language, nouns instead of verbs, etc.
Written Swedish has stayed much closer to the daily language of common
people. (Ah, and I remember an article by a Swedish ``spr�kv�rdare''
who writes that they have a hard time to translate the EU bureaucrats
into comprehensible Swedish.)
What I find remarkable is the germanic (miss)habit of concatenating
nouns. On the one side this seems to make it especially easy in
German to formulate nonsense that looks meaningful to an uncritical
reader/hearer. This is used a lot in advertising and politics. You
encounter things like ``Wohnwelt''. ``Wohnen'' means living/dwelling
and ``Welt'' means world. The ordinary German will ``feel something''
when he hears ``Wohnwelt'' and this is exploited by the advertiser to
address him. Another rather new concatenation, used a lot as a
political club, is ``Erinnerungskultur''. On the other side it is
especially easy in German to introduce new terms in science by naming
an abstraction through a concatenation of nouns that hint at the
contents of the abstraction.
Finally, we have already seen a funny concatenation within the current
thread: ``Katzenjammer''. Resolving it into the two words will not
lead to the meaning which is hangover or, in a wider sense, when
someone feels bad and complains though this is the consequence of
something that he originally welcomed and where the consequence should
have been obvious. I thought a little over that strange expression
and it quicly occured to me that the usual translation of hangover is
``Kater''. Now that word means also (in the first place) a male cat!
And there is also ``Muskelkater'' meaning delayed onset muscle
soreness.
But phonetically ``Kater'' is close to greek ``katharsis'' and there
is a German Wikipedia artikel saying the word ``Kater'' started to be
used in the 19-th century by university students to describe their
state after an evening of drinking.
Making ``Katzenjammer'' from ``Kater'' was then a straightforward
``Verballhornung'' (cacography). Lang lebe die deutsche Sprache!
--
hw
Rune Allnor
> Rune Allnor <all...@tele.ntnu.no> writes:
> > The grammar is a simplified
> > version of the German grammar, words are concatenated
> > in much the same way as in German, and the vocabulary is
> > partially Germanic, with increasing amounts of anglicisms.
>
> I guess grammar is the other way round.
German correct grammar is definately more complicted than
the Scandinavian grammars. The Scandinavian grammars sort
nouns in genuses, masculine, feminine, and neutral, and
use grammar rules accordingly.
But unlike German, the Scandinavian languages has no
mechanism to indicate dative, accusative and the likes.
There are still traces of such forms, at least in certain
Norwegian dialects, but the main languages have long since
lost them.
> Written Swedish has stayed much closer to the daily language of common
> people. (Ah, and I remember an article by a Swedish ``språkvårdare''
> who writes that they have a hard time to translate the EU bureaucrats
> into comprehensible Swedish.)
Sure. Language equals expression. Different languages
invite different expressions. I can write phrases in both
Norwegian and English I would never dream of saying
orally (I am talking about *phrasing*, not contents),
simply because written and spoken languages are
different.
If you have seen the movie "lock, stock and two
smoking barrels" you know what I mean. The dialogue
in that film might look good in text, but just sounds
awkward, construed and stylized in the flesh.
> Finally, we have already seen a funny concatenation within the current
> thread: ``Katzenjammer''. Resolving it into the two words will not
> lead to the meaning which is hangover or, in a wider sense, when
> someone feels bad and complains though this is the consequence of
> something that he originally welcomed and where the consequence should
> have been obvious. I thought a little over that strange expression
> and it quicly occured to me that the usual translation of hangover is
> ``Kater''. Now that word means also (in the first place) a male cat!
> And there is also ``Muskelkater'' meaning delayed onset muscle
> soreness.
>
> But phonetically ``Kater'' is close to greek ``katharsis'' and there
> is a German Wikipedia artikel saying the word ``Kater'' started to be
> used in the 19-th century by university students to describe their
> state after an evening of drinking.
>
> Making ``Katzenjammer'' from ``Kater'' was then a straightforward
> ``Verballhornung'' (cacography). Lang lebe die deutsche Sprache!
I would have guessed "Katze" = "cat". In that case,
"katzenjammer" means something like "squealing sounds
made by cats".
But I have got burned on etymological speculations
in the past.
Rune
Jim Wilkins
>
> But I have got burned on etymological speculations
> in the past.
>
> Rune
Translations can be much harder when the phrase is from literature.
Referring again to the Moscow-Washington Hot Line article I've been
reading, they used "Horses, people" from Lermontov's poem
"Borodino" (a Napoleonic battle) to describe a chaotic political
situation. Luckily it was only a training exercise, that one
confounded the translators for a while.
The call sign of one of the Soviets in the KAL007 incident was
"Trikotazh" To me it suggests the French word for knitting, or perhaps
his home-made sweater. I asked an Air Force Russian translator about
it and he was stumped.
Lermontov was originally Learmont, a Scottish refugee from some
political mishmash.
jsw
Jerry Avins
> On 25 Nov, 14:14, Heinrich Wolf <mu...@hemedarwa.de> wrote:
...
>> Making ``Katzenjammer'' from ``Kater'' was then a straightforward
>> ``Verballhornung'' (cacography). Lang lebe die deutsche Sprache!
>
> I would have guessed "Katze" = "cat". In that case,
> "katzenjammer" means something like "squealing sounds
> made by cats".
>
> But I have got burned on etymological speculations
> in the past.
In New York at least, katzenjammer includes "noisy hubbub" among its
meanings. "Yammer" means lament; wail; shriek. Perhaps
http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/katzkids/about.htm led to
the local (and colloquial) meaning.
Rich Grise
>
> One trap to be aware of, though, is Norw. "�l" vs German "�l". The
> former means "beer", the latter "oil".
>
Cheers!
Rich
Richard Owlett
> [snip]
>> Finally, we have already seen a funny concatenation within the current
>> thread: ``Katzenjammer''. Resolving it into the two words will not
>> lead to the meaning which is hangover or, in a wider sense, when
>> someone feels bad and complains though this is the consequence of
>> something that he originally welcomed and where the consequence should
>> have been obvious. I thought a little over that strange expression
>> and it quicly occured to me that the usual translation of hangover is
>> ``Kater''. Now that word means also (in the first place) a male cat!
>> And there is also ``Muskelkater'' meaning delayed onset muscle
>> soreness.
>>
>> But phonetically ``Kater'' is close to greek ``katharsis'' and there
>> is a German Wikipedia artikel saying the word ``Kater'' started to be
>> used in the 19-th century by university students to describe their
>> state after an evening of drinking.
>>
>> Making ``Katzenjammer'' from ``Kater'' was then a straightforward
>> ``Verballhornung'' (cacography). Lang lebe die deutsche Sprache!
>
> I would have guessed "Katze" = "cat". In that case,
> "katzenjammer" means something like "squealing sounds
> made by cats".
>
> But I have got burned on etymological speculations
> in the past.
>
> Rune
But then the reference gets moved to another language - English.
I grew up with a comic strip titled "Katzenjammer kids"
q.v. http://www.google.com/search?q=Katzenjammer+kids
Evidently it was created by a German immigrant. Was title a joke
referring to a hangover or to a squealing cat?
Rich Grise
>
> Finally, we have already seen a funny concatenation within the current
> thread: ``Katzenjammer''. Resolving it into the two words will not lead
> to the meaning which is hangover or, in a wider sense, when someone feels
> bad and complains though this is the consequence of something that he
> originally welcomed and where the consequence should have been obvious. I
> thought a little over that strange expression and it quicly occured to me
> that the usual translation of hangover is ``Kater''. Now that word means
> also (in the first place) a male cat! And there is also ``Muskelkater''
> meaning delayed onset muscle soreness.
So, what's the derivation of "The Katzenjammer Kids?"
http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/katzkids/about.htm
;-)
Rich
Rich Grise
>
> If you have seen the movie "lock, stock and two smoking barrels" you know
> what I mean. The dialogue in that film might look good in text, but just
> sounds awkward, construed and stylized in the flesh.
Yikes! I'm 60 freakin' years old, and I swear, as Goddess is my witness,
that this is the first time in my life I realized that this refers to a
gun! All my life, I've assumed that it had something to do with shipping,
meaning "a full load of cargo."
"Stock" - well, compare "stockroom", and "barrel", well, that's a
container with staves, used for shipping all manner of stuff. The "Lock"
part, I simply assumed was something I didn't know about, maybe the
padlock on a treasure chest or something.
Thanks,
Rich
Jim Wilkins
> On Wed, 25 Nov 2009 05:46:25 -0800, Rune Allnor wrote:
>
> > If you have seen the movie "lock, stock and two smoking barrels" you know
> > what I mean. The dialogue in that film might look good in text, but just
> > sounds awkward, construed and stylized in the flesh.
>
> Yikes! I'm 60 freakin' years old, and I swear, as Goddess is my witness,
> that this is the first time in my life I realized that this refers to a
>
> Rich
Specifically it refers to a muzzle-loader's main subassemblies.
Tauno Voipio
> On Nov 24, 8:40 pm, Rune Allnor <all...@tele.ntnu.no> wrote:
>> On 25 Nov, 02:12, Jim Wilkins <kb1...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> ...
>>
>> If you know both German and English, you should be able to
>> come a long way understanding written Norwegian and Danish,
>> and presumably also Swedish. The grammar is a simplified
>> version of the German grammar, words are concatenated
>> in much the same way as in German, and the vocabulary is
>> partially Germanic, with increasing amounts of anglicisms.
>>
>> Rune
>
> Also Dutch, after learning the voiced-unvoiced shifts etc. I can't
> really make much sense of Swedish and Finnish is of course impossible.
>
Cannot resist ...
Finnish is a totally different beast from the germanic (or old
Viking) languages: The only living language resembling Finnish
so far that I can guess about half of it is Estonian. Hungarian
is a distant relative: from a distance it sounds familiar, but I
cannot catch a word. The whole group of Fenno-Ugrian languages
should have gone the way of dinosaurs aeons ago. Maybe the rescue
has been the remote location we are in, similarly as the original
Viking language is deep-frozen in Icelandic.
For me, with Swedish as second native language, Norwegian sounds
like funny Swedish, but Danish pronounciation is impossible, though
written Danish can be understood with some guesswork (or a dictionary).
--
Tauno Voipio
tauno voipio (at) iki fi
Rune Allnor
wrote:
> Jim Wilkins wrote:
> > On Nov 24, 8:40 pm, Rune Allnor <all...@tele.ntnu.no> wrote:
> >> On 25 Nov, 02:12, Jim Wilkins <kb1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> ...
>
> >> If you know both German and English, you should be able to
> >> come a long way understanding written Norwegian and Danish,
> >> and presumably also Swedish. The grammar is a simplified
> >> version of the German grammar, words are concatenated
> >> in much the same way as in German, and the vocabulary is
> >> partially Germanic, with increasing amounts of anglicisms.
>
> >> Rune
>
> > Also Dutch, after learning the voiced-unvoiced shifts etc. I can't
> > really make much sense of Swedish and Finnish is of course impossible.
>
> Cannot resist ...
>
> Finnish is a totally different beast from the germanic (or old
> Viking) languages: The only living language resembling Finnish
> so far that I can guess about half of it is Estonian.
How about Sami? For somebody who knows neither Finnish
or Sami, the two have certain 'acoustic' characteristics
in common, but that might just be a coincidence?
> For me, with Swedish as second native language, Norwegian sounds
> like funny Swedish,
*Formal* Norwegian (highly influenced by the dialects
in the south-east central area, near Oslo) sounds like
Donald Duck on helium. People with that kind of native
dialect would struggle very hard to be taken seriously
while speaking any non-native language.
My native dialect seems to be a somewhat better staring
point for speaking English, and particularly Italian.
> but Danish pronounciation is impossible,
Danes speak as if they have a boiling hot potato in
their mouth. And no, that's only half a joke: It seems
that Danish kids are among the slowest to learn their
native language, lagging developments of other native
languages by maybe as much as 50% (Danish kids meet
linguistic expectations for 2-year-olds at age 3).
Rune
Reinhard Zwirner
>
> It's a plastic distributor cap, I had to learn and correctly pronounce
> the names of the numerous parts I bought to maintain my $200 VW and
> make it pass the Army's version of the strict TUV inspection. Some
> aren't so obvious, headlights are "shine throwers", plugs are "spark
> candles", hex nuts are "mothers", especially the rusted ones.
There's a slight difference:
EN GE
mother Mutter
mothers M�tter (Muetter)
hex nut Mutter
hex nuts Muttern
HTH ;-)
Reinhard
Eric Jacobsen
> On 25 Nov, 14:14, Heinrich Wolf<mu...@hemedarwa.de> wrote:
>> Rune Allnor<all...@tele.ntnu.no> writes:
>
>>> The grammar is a simplified
>>> version of the German grammar, words are concatenated
>>> in much the same way as in German, and the vocabulary is
>>> partially Germanic, with increasing amounts of anglicisms.
>> I guess grammar is the other way round.
>
> German correct grammar is definately more complicted than
> the Scandinavian grammars. The Scandinavian grammars sort
> nouns in genuses, masculine, feminine, and neutral, and
> use grammar rules accordingly.
>
> But unlike German, the Scandinavian languages has no
> mechanism to indicate dative, accusative and the likes.
> There are still traces of such forms, at least in certain
> Norwegian dialects, but the main languages have long since
> lost them.
>
>> Written Swedish has stayed much closer to the daily language of common
>> who writes that they have a hard time to translate the EU bureaucrats
>> into comprehensible Swedish.)
>
> Sure. Language equals expression. Different languages
> invite different expressions. I can write phrases in both
> Norwegian and English I would never dream of saying
> orally (I am talking about *phrasing*, not contents),
> simply because written and spoken languages are
> different.
>
> If you have seen the movie "lock, stock and two
> smoking barrels" you know what I mean. The dialogue
> in that film might look good in text, but just sounds
> awkward, construed and stylized in the flesh.
That was intentional in that particular movie, and even as a native
English speaker I had to have a lot of it explained to me by some
British friends. Many of the jokes and the verbal nuances in that movie
had to do with the plays on Cockney rhyming slang. It's a much deeper
and interesting movie when you're aware of that, and I think much of it
still went over my head.
>
>> Finally, we have already seen a funny concatenation within the current
>> thread: ``Katzenjammer''. Resolving it into the two words will not
>> lead to the meaning which is hangover or, in a wider sense, when
>> someone feels bad and complains though this is the consequence of
>> something that he originally welcomed and where the consequence should
>> have been obvious. I thought a little over that strange expression
>> and it quicly occured to me that the usual translation of hangover is
>> ``Kater''. Now that word means also (in the first place) a male cat!
>> And there is also ``Muskelkater'' meaning delayed onset muscle
>> soreness.
>>
>> But phonetically ``Kater'' is close to greek ``katharsis'' and there
>> is a German Wikipedia artikel saying the word ``Kater'' started to be
>> used in the 19-th century by university students to describe their
>> state after an evening of drinking.
>>
>> Making ``Katzenjammer'' from ``Kater'' was then a straightforward
>> ``Verballhornung'' (cacography). Lang lebe die deutsche Sprache!
>
> I would have guessed "Katze" = "cat". In that case,
> "katzenjammer" means something like "squealing sounds
> made by cats".
>
> But I have got burned on etymological speculations
> in the past.
>
> Rune
Heinrich Wolf
> Rune Allnor wrote:
>> On 25 Nov, 14:14, Heinrich Wolf <mu...@hemedarwa.de> wrote:
>
> ...
>>> Making ``Katzenjammer'' from ``Kater'' was then a straightforward
>>> ``Verballhornung'' (cacography). Lang lebe die deutsche Sprache!
>> I would have guessed "Katze" = "cat". In that case,
>> "katzenjammer" means something like "squealing sounds
>> made by cats".
>> But I have got burned on etymological speculations
>> in the past.
>
> In New York at least, katzenjammer includes "noisy hubbub" among its
> meanings. "Yammer" means lament; wail; shriek. Perhaps
> http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/katzkids/about.htm led to
> the local (and colloquial) meaning.
That would rather be ``Katzenmusik'' in German. You might want to look up
both terms at
http://wortschatz.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/
I have scanned and put on the Web a work by Wilhelm Busch, author of
``Max und Moritz'', called ``Katzenjammer am Neujahrsmorgen''. You
can find it at
--
hw
Rune Allnor
> On 11/25/2009 6:46 AM, Rune Allnor wrote:
> > Sure. Language equals expression. Different languages
> > invite different expressions. I can write phrases in both
> > Norwegian and English I would never dream of saying
> > orally (I am talking about *phrasing*, not contents),
> > simply because written and spoken languages are
> > different.
>
> > If you have seen the movie "lock, stock and two
> > smoking barrels" you know what I mean. The dialogue
> > in that film might look good in text, but just sounds
> > awkward, construed and stylized in the flesh.
>
> That was intentional in that particular movie,
I am sure it was intentional. Still, I think its dialog was
a very good example on the difference between written and
spoken language. The non-cockney English came across as
very formalistic and stylized etc. The cockneys I have
worked with, talked nowhere near the dialog of that movie.
> and even as a native
> English speaker I had to have a lot of it explained to me by some
> British friends. Many of the jokes and the verbal nuances in that movie
> had to do with the plays on Cockney rhyming slang. It's a much deeper
> and interesting movie when you're aware of that, and I think much of it
> still went over my head.
I've seen the movie a couple of times, but with Norwegian
subtitles. I must admit that with the subtitles, my attention
to the spoken dialog is not quite as high as it might have been.
Rune
Jerry Avins
Thank you. I use DjVu to read the Century Dictionary at
http://www.global-language.com/CENTURY/, so I had nothing to install.
Tauno Voipio
> On 25 Nov, 18:51, Tauno Voipio <tauno.voi...@notused.fi.invalid>
> wrote:
>> Cannot resist ...
>>
>> Finnish is a totally different beast from the germanic (or old
>> Viking) languages: The only living language resembling Finnish
>> so far that I can guess about half of it is Estonian.
>
> How about Sami? For somebody who knows neither Finnish
> or Sami, the two have certain 'acoustic' characteristics
> in common, but that might just be a coincidence?
Sami is actually a group of half-dozen dialects which
are so far from each other that Sami-speaking people
may not understand speakers from a non-neighbour dialect.
Sami is a member of the Fenno-Ugrian language group. Looked
from Finnish, Sami is somewhere between Estonian and Hungarian:
I can catch some expressions but most of it is incomprehensible.
>> For me, with Swedish as second native language, Norwegian sounds
>> like funny Swedish,
>
> *Formal* Norwegian (highly influenced by the dialects
> in the south-east central area, near Oslo) sounds like
> Donald Duck on helium. People with that kind of native
> dialect would struggle very hard to be taken seriously
> while speaking any non-native language.
>
> My native dialect seems to be a somewhat better staring
> point for speaking English, and particularly Italian.
Bokm�l / nynorsk?
--
-Tauno
Rune Allnor
wrote:
> Rune Allnor wrote:
> >> For me, with Swedish as second native language, Norwegian sounds
> >> like funny Swedish,
>
> > *Formal* Norwegian (highly influenced by the dialects
> > in the south-east central area, near Oslo) sounds like
> > Donald Duck on helium. People with that kind of native
> > dialect would struggle very hard to be taken seriously
> > while speaking any non-native language.
>
> > My native dialect seems to be a somewhat better staring
> > point for speaking English, and particularly Italian.
>
> Bokmål / nynorsk?
Those are the two *written* forms of Norwegian: Bokmål
(litteraly "the language of/from the books") was based on
the Danish written language established by the Danish
government during the "400-year night", when Norway was
a subsidiary to the Danish crown between ~1380 and 1814.
The civil servants had all been trained in Denmark, and
wrote Danish fluently, so the obvious thing to do was to
keep business as usual.
Since then the 'official' written Norwegian language was
dominated by the heritage from the Danish civil service.
To this day, some 200 years later, it is very little
difference between written Norwegian Bokmål and written
Danish. A non-native speaker of both the two languages
would need to know what to look for, to see the difference.
However, bokmål is strictly a written language. Some
people *claim* to speak bokmål, but in reality only
speaks a normalized dialect that is the closest to the
written language, but still far enough away that they
are two different forms.
In the nationalromantic era that followed the 1814
emancipation from the Danes there was a movement to
establish a home-grown Norwegian written language,
to replace the heritage from the Danes.
The idea was to compensate for the Danish influence,
represented by the civil service and the urban
establishment, by basing the new written language on
the rural spoken dialects. Unfortunately, there was an
over-compensation, in that the person in charge,
Ivar Aasen, went to the furthest, most remote valleys
he could possibly reach with 1820-30s communications.
So he ended up doubly alienating his intended audience,
partially by using the most obscure rural non-Danish
forms he could possibly find; partially by restricting
his data to the areas near the south-east central,
leaving a lot of the more remote areas, particularly
around the coast, uncatered for.
Lots of people who might have been positive to the
efforts were alienated by this over-compensation,
leaving the population in two entrenched camps,
fiercly disagreeing with each other. After a lot of
hubbub, this written language has now become what
is known as "nynorsk", "New Norwegian".
Repercussions of the ancient battles are stil raging,
as kids think nynorsk (which in these days is based on
an average of the spoken Norwegian dialects) is "grautmål",
"porrage language", while they at the same time are
battling with the not at all insignificant (well, all
out irrational) quirks, twists and turns associated
with making an artifical written language match up with
their spoken languages.
As for myself, I speak a normalized (probably more
so than I am aware) form of a northern dialect, that
matches quite nicely with the present norm of nynorsk.
(Not that it matters: I still write bokmål, as does
some 80-90% of the population.) My dialect is non-typical
Norwegian in that the 'melody' (prosidy?) matches quite
well with both English (well, at least compared to most
Norwegian dialects).
Many years ago I stayed a few months in Italy, with
another Norwegian who spoke one of the dominant
Norwegian dialects. People who heard us talk among
ourselfs could not understand how we could possibly
be talking the same language. During that stay I
learned that the melody/prosidy my non-normalized
Norwegian dialect is particularly well matched up
with the Italian langauge.
Rune
Gunner Asch
Hell..Finn is easy
Noh, moniko sinun sedist�si on tehnyt itsemurhan t�n� vuonna?
Piva!
Gunner
"Aren't cats Libertarian? They just want to be left alone.
I think our dog is a Democrat, as he is always looking for a handout"
Unknown Usnet Poster
Heh, heh, I'm pretty sure my dog is a liberal - he has no balls.
Keyton
Jim Wilkins
> >
> Piva!
>
> Gunner
In most of that part of Europe it's BEER.
Gunner Asch
Tauno Voipio
>
> Hell..Finn is easy
>
> Noh, moniko sinun sedist�si on tehnyt itsemurhan t�n� vuonna?
>
None - they have died of old age years ago, my father
is the only one of five left.
> Piva!
If you're looking for beer, it looks like that in Slavic
languages, but ours is olut (�lle in Estonian), obviously
from the Scandinavian �l.
--
-Tauno
Tauno Voipio
> On 25 Nov, 21:46, Tauno Voipio <tauno.voi...@notused.fi.invalid>
> wrote:
>> Rune Allnor wrote:
>
>>>> For me, with Swedish as second native language, Norwegian sounds
>>>> like funny Swedish,
>>> *Formal* Norwegian (highly influenced by the dialects
>>> in the south-east central area, near Oslo) sounds like
>>> Donald Duck on helium. People with that kind of native
>>> dialect would struggle very hard to be taken seriously
>>> while speaking any non-native language.
>>> My native dialect seems to be a somewhat better staring
>>> point for speaking English, and particularly Italian.
>
> Those are the two *written* forms of Norwegian: Bokm锟絣
> (litteraly "the language of/from the books") was based on
> the Danish written language established by the Danish
> government during the "400-year night", when Norway was
> a subsidiary to the Danish crown between ~1380 and 1814.
> The civil servants had all been trained in Denmark, and
> wrote Danish fluently, so the obvious thing to do was to
> keep business as usual.
>
> Since then the 'official' written Norwegian language was
> dominated by the heritage from the Danish civil service.
> To this day, some 200 years later, it is very little
> Danish. A non-native speaker of both the two languages
> would need to know what to look for, to see the difference.
>
> people *claim* to speak bokm锟絣, but in reality only
> "porrage language", while they at the same time are
> battling with the not at all insignificant (well, all
> out irrational) quirks, twists and turns associated
> with making an artifical written language match up with
> their spoken languages.
>
> As for myself, I speak a normalized (probably more
> so than I am aware) form of a northern dialect, that
> matches quite nicely with the present norm of nynorsk.
> some 80-90% of the population.) My dialect is non-typical
> Norwegian in that the 'melody' (prosidy?) matches quite
> well with both English (well, at least compared to most
> Norwegian dialects).
>
> Many years ago I stayed a few months in Italy, with
> another Norwegian who spoke one of the dominant
> Norwegian dialects. People who heard us talk among
> ourselfs could not understand how we could possibly
> be talking the same language. During that stay I
> learned that the melody/prosidy my non-normalized
> Norwegian dialect is particularly well matched up
> with the Italian langauge.
>
> Rune
Thanks, Rune. I'm afraid that all the dialects sound
like funny Swedish to me ...
--
-Tauno
Frank-Stefan Müller
> On 25 Nov, 00:23, Jim Wilkins <kb1...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Nov 24, 2:52 pm, Eric Jacobsen <eric.jacob...@ieee.org> wrote:
>>
>>> On 11/24/2009 12:37 PM, Marte Schwarz wrote:
>>>> Hi Jim,
>>> ...
>>> It's funny that a lot of the non-conversational words that I still
>>> remember are technical stuff like that: vergasser = carburetor,
>>> einspritz = fuel injection. I guess I've always been a car guy. ;)>> I've waited 36 years for an excuse to drop "Zundverteilerkopf" into a
>> conversation.
>
> 'Verteilerkopf' = 'distributor head' is obvious. Can't
> figure out 'Zund' without a dictionary?
>
> Rune
Hi Rune,
I know the word but I never really knew the exact meaning.
Looked it up at http://www.freedic.net/index.php, it means
"Ehrfurchteinfl�ssend" Awe-inspiring, it sounds very old fashioned in
german.
greetings Frank
PS don�t forget to Z�nd the Umlaut!
Andreas Huennebeck
> On 25 Nov, 21:46, Tauno Voipio <tauno.voi...@notused.fi.invalid>
> wrote:
>> Rune Allnor wrote:
>
>> >> For me, with Swedish as second native language, Norwegian sounds
>> >> like funny Swedish,
For me as a german, who learned some Norwegian 18 years ago (and
using it in regular vacations) and who currently learns Swedish,
Swedish sounds like fuzzy Norwegian ;-)
>> Bokmï¿œl / nynorsk?
>
> Those are the two *written* forms of Norwegian: Bokmï¿œl
> (litteraly "the language of/from the books") was based on [..]
Takk, det var veldig interessant.
> As for myself, I speak a normalized (probably more
> so than I am aware) form of a northern dialect, that
> matches quite nicely with the present norm of nynorsk.
Yes; I've noticed that people in northern Norway use
words from Nynorsk (as far as I'm able to understand).
bye
Andreas
--
Andreas Hï¿œnnebeck | email: ac...@gmx.de
----- privat ---- | www : http://www.huennebeck-online.de
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Stormin Mormon
Stock: wooden holder to fit your shoulder.
Barrel: tube which fires the bullet
It's not really common use, now that we've progressed past
flintlocks.
--
Christopher A. Young
Learn more about Jesus
www.lds.org
.
"Rich Grise" <rich...@example.net> wrote in message
news:pan.2009.11.25....@example.net...
Tim Wescott
You're 60 freakin' years old and still have opportunities to stretch
those old brain cells!
I knew what it meant whenever I thought hard about it, but for the most
part it's just another cliché rattling around in the old brain pan.
(We need _new_ metaphors to replace these old clichés that you have to be
a historian to understand their meaning. How many kids these days --
even ones that shoot -- are going to 'get' "lock, stock and barrel"?)
Tim Wescott
And talking about clichés, Wikipedia has this quote from Salvidore Dalí:
"The first man to compare the flabby cheeks of a young woman to a rose
was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot."
Tim Wescott
So what happens if someone just tries to write in their own dialect -- I
assume that one would have to come up with spellings on one's own, at
least to some extent.
Would this be greeted with joy as being sincere/nationalistic/avant-
guard, or would it be considered hackneyed?
How does a writer render dialog?
Jim Wilkins
Read William Faulkner.
Yiddish spelling is a good example of phonetic German dialect.
jsw
krw
wrote:
>On Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:27:00 -0800, Rich Grise wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 25 Nov 2009 05:46:25 -0800, Rune Allnor wrote:
>>>
>>> If you have seen the movie "lock, stock and two smoking barrels" you
>>> know what I mean. The dialogue in that film might look good in text,
>>> but just sounds awkward, construed and stylized in the flesh.
>>
>> Yikes! I'm 60 freakin' years old, and I swear, as Goddess is my witness,
>> that this is the first time in my life I realized that this refers to a
>> gun! All my life, I've assumed that it had something to do with
>> shipping, meaning "a full load of cargo."
>>
>> "Stock" - well, compare "stockroom", and "barrel", well, that's a
>> container with staves, used for shipping all manner of stuff. The "Lock"
>> part, I simply assumed was something I didn't know about, maybe the
>> padlock on a treasure chest or something.
>
>You're 60 freakin' years old and still have opportunities to stretch
>those old brain cells!
>
>I knew what it meant whenever I thought hard about it, but for the most
>part it's just another clich� rattling around in the old brain pan.
>
>(We need _new_ metaphors to replace these old clich�s that you have to be
>a historian to understand their meaning. How many kids these days --
>even ones that shoot -- are going to 'get' "lock, stock and barrel"?)
I'm not (quite) 60, never shot firearms as a kid, but understood the
meaning and roots of LS&B. ...maybe from US history. <horrors>
lang...@fonz.dk
I guess it would be just as you would if you wanted
to write a dialect in english, invent you own spelling
To me as a dane written norwegian looks like danish
someone who can't spell too good wrote :)
danish spelling often isn't like the sound of the words,
in norwegian it looks like everything is spelled
like it sounds,
-Lasse
Rune Allnor
> On Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:17:46 -0800, Rune Allnor wrote:
> >> Bokmål / nynorsk?
>
> > Those are the two *written* forms of Norwegian:
...
> So what happens if someone just tries to write in their own dialect -- I
> assume that one would have to come up with spellings on one's own, at
> least to some extent.
It *can* be done, and works to whatever extent the reader
is familiar with the dialect. The problem is that everything
depends on the reader being familiar with intonation and
grammar.
Formal Norwegian distinguishes between singular and plural
the same way English does, by appending an ending to the
noun. In English one appends '-s' or '-ses'; in Norwegian
one appends '-er'. So with the noun 'sau' (Eng. 'sheep'),
the (official) singular is 'sau' and the (official) plural
is 'sauer'.
However, in my (almost) native dialect (we moved to the area
when I was about 6), this is messed up by the fact that any
endings are consistently chopped off, and replaced by a
very subtle change in intonation. With the example above,
the singular is still 'sau', but the plural is also 'sau' but
with an almost imperceptible change of intonation.
I was about six when I first learnd these things, so I
used to know how to phrase the distinction myself, and
I am perfectly able to hear better speakers of this dialect
than myself who use it (my own spoken language has changed
quite a bit sine I left the area). My parents, who were in
their early thirties when we moved to the area, might know
of the general mechanism, but seem to be unable to recognize,
let alone use, this subtle effect.
Writing in this dialect would strip a reader unfamiliar
with these idiosyncracies of just about every grammatic
mechanism he is uses to employ to make sense of the
semantics.
This might be an extreme example (the dialects of this
particular area usually recieve significant attention in
schoolbooks), but all dialects tend to present similar
types of problems.
> Would this be greeted with joy as being sincere/nationalistic/avant-
> guard, or would it be considered hackneyed?
People who write dialect tend to write for a local audience,
like in county yearbooks etc.
But you are onto something: Whenever there are significant
divisions of opinions in the population, they tend to follow
the (written) language division: Environmentalists tend to
write nynorsk; No-to-EU people (we have refused to join the EU
in two referenda, 1972 and 1994) tend to write nynorsk;
the populus of the Norwegian equivalent to the Bible belt
tend to write nynorsk; the people in the fundamental economical
vocations, like fishermen, tend to write nynorsk. People
in the rural, remote areas (along the coast, in the valleys)
tend to write nynorsk.
Well, 'tend to' means that the relative fractions of nynorsk
writers are higher in the mentioned groups than in the
whole population.
> How does a writer render dialog?
Very formally. That is, in formal/normalized language
with phrasings that wouldn't work orally. One might
use certain grammatic or other stereotypes to indicate
that a character speaks a certain dialect, but very
seldomly and very cautiosly.
Rune
Rune Allnor
> danish spelling often isn't like the sound of the words,
> in norwegian it looks like everything is spelled
> like it sounds,
Actually, no.
Consider the two English words 'skirt' and 'shirt'.
Then 'taste' the pronounciation and note how the
respective 'sk' and 'sh' spellings indicate clearly how
to pronounce the word: The 'k' in 'skirt' is clearly
defined, following the 's'; the 'h' in 'shirt' clearly
indicates how to modify the 's' from a 'z'-type sound
towards a 'ch'-type sound.
No such nice system in Norwegian.
There is a word in Norwegian that is pronounced virtually
exactly like the English 'shirt'. It is spelled 'skjørt'
(Eng. 'fragile').
The 'kj' plays the same part as the 'h' in the English
word, but you wouldn't know that from knowledge about
the 'k' and 'j' sounds, and the spelling.
These kinds of things present huge problems for kids
who try to learn how to spell. They are first taught
how to decode the letters in terms of sounds, and all
of a sudden these kinds of things come and violate all
the rules the have just learned.
Dyslexia is a common problem here.
There are also problems with common words like the 1st
person personal pronoun, 'I' in English. It is spelled
'Jeg' in Norwegian bokmål, but pronounced in just about
any other way: Eg, ei, i, je, æ, e, jei, jæi, and those
are only the forms I remember off the top of my head.
And so and so forth.
Rune
Jim Wilkins
> ..
>
> These kinds of things present huge problems for kids
> who try to learn how to spell. They are first taught
> how to decode the letters in terms of sounds, and all
> of a sudden these kinds of things come and violate all
>
> Rune
English certainly isn't exempt from odd spellings, being a mix of the
Celtic of the Britons, the Germanic of the Anglo-Saxons and the Viking
French of the Normans, plus random Latin and Greek to make up new
words like telephone.
In English many of the rural words evolved from the Germanic of King
Arthur's time, and are sometimes irregular (field/Feld, cow/Kuh, spade/
Spate, hen/Hahn, mouse/Maus). The urban ones are more French and
follow the rules better.
Have you encountered George Bernard Shaw's spelling of "fish" as
GHOTI? GH as in laugh, O as in women, TI as in nation.
jsw