6d ago

If German was English

92 comments

Isn't English the amalgamation of like 5 different languages and if everything were broken down like this, English would sound just as ridiculous?
- I think every language probably sounds silly if transliterated into another language
  
  It's not a transliteration, it's a direct translation. Transliteration is the conversion of one script into another and (Modern) English and German use the same script based on Latin. Transliteration would be дружба - druzhba.
  By the way, in many German online communities, it's a meme to take English expressions and directly translate them and is called Zangendeutsch. Just go to any of the ich_iel communities here and you can see it :)
  
  You’ve clearly never heard of Torpenhow Hill, which translating all to English, means Hill Hill Hill Hill.
  
  a language would sound the same when transliterated to another language
- I only did three months of research for this comic. Guess it still wasn't enough. Verdammte Bullenscheiße!
  
  Common rookie mistake everyone knows you need four months
  
  Do 3 months of research on English. I'm sure the comic will be good too :)
- The Anglo-Saxons loved compound words. The vocabulary of Old English (and just before that) was very small, so putting words together was necessary for building more complex concepts.
  English, a Germanic tongue carried into Britain by the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians, has been influenced by:
  Celtic languages
  A tiny bit of Pictish
  Old Norse
  Latin
  Greek
  Norman Old French (a dialect somewhat distinct from the rest of Frankia)
  Plenty of other things
  
  My favorite English compound word is bookkeeper. 3 consecutive double letters.
- We can do that with the first sentence and flip it into German, replacing "lighter" with "fireworks". We get:
  "Sie dürfen die Feuerarbeiten nicht mit in die Luftebene nehmen."
  A lot of German speaking communities online do translate English loanwords into German words, often with the intention to create this funny effect.
- There is a form of English called Anglish which tries to remove all non-germanic words, I think some examples are wordbook for dictionary, becleft for atom, sourstuff for oxygen and birdlore for orinthology
  
  Ah, you beat me to it!
  https://anglish.org/wiki/Anglish
- Coincidentally, I just watched a video on that sort of thing the other day that was pretty neat: Anglish: English without the 'foreign' bits
  
  I've loved Anglish for a long time, but my favorite example is Uncleftish Beholding a scientific paper written in Anglish. "Stuff" turns out to be a pretty logical way to explain shit.
- Close, English is the unholy amalgamation of 666 incomplete languages, forged in the bowels of the great vowl shift but incomplete as an affront to God and the eighth deadly sin.
- English is a hilarious mess. The word "receite" originated from Latin but came to England through France at which point it had mutated to modern pronunciation as "recu", so they shoved a few extra and silent letters in there and spelled it "receipt" to pretend they got it from Latin even though they kept pronouncing it more French.
  
  I'm confused. The modern word in french is "reçu", which is pronounced something like "ruhsue". The English word is "receipt" but pronounced something like "ruhseet". There's no "ooh" sound in the original Latin, so it's not just a matter of adding extra or silent letters in there, it's a complete change to the vowel sounds, plus the re-addition of a 't' sound.

Me laughing at Germans for calling hospitals "sick houses".
Me realizing hospitals are called "hurty places" in my native language.
- It's not a sick house. It's a house for sick people.
- It's sick house for some other languages too.

I'mma be honest, English has no business making fun of any other language. English is not a language, it's three languages standing on eachother's shoulders in a trenchcoat.
- Heh. In this case I am making fun of my own language, though.
  
  Ich mag es.
- The English language is a giant meme.

I would argue that the correct translation of Zeug is more like "thing". Wagen would be "car" in the context of the cartoon. But then it wouldn't sound absurd and their lowball attempt at humor wouldn't work.
- TIL some StarCraft objects are called Zergzeug
- Car is short for carriage.
- Specifically a tool, like a Werkzeug for example.
  Edit: that's what I get for commenting after only reading the first panel then, haha.
- Agreed. Stoff would be the German for stuff. The Germans had a rocket propelled interceptor plane called the Komet, and its two parts of fuel were called C-Stoff and Z-Stoff.
  I imagine the military looking at the names for the things and going “yeah, we need to dumb it down for our grunts.”

Because it took me way too long: Beender=Terminator
- (there's an unwritten glottal stop between those two ee's, for anyone wondering)
- Beender Beending Rodriguez

One Word you mentioned showed nicely what you missed here: Plain
Originally it was called an aeroplane. This could be translated with "flat thing in the air". Which is exactly as ridiculous as your other examples in German. The difference is that Germans don't mind complicated long words where English does so they just drop the part they don't like.
- Oh Germans do drop parts they don't like. For example, they drop the Gute- from Gutemorgen.
  
  Guten Morgen ist ein Oxymoron!
  
  No texactly. I drop the "Wassn scheiß"

the thing about compound words is that they become a new word and people usually don't think about them by breaking them up so they don't sound ridiculous. if another language has a dedicated word for it, comparing them with the direct translation of the broken up compound word makes a funny comparison.
if you'd like to break up some English compound words to see how they might sound weird or basic in other languages here are some examples:
arm chair
arm pit
blue print
cup cake
dead line
eye lash
fire fighter
fire man
fire works
home sick
horse shoe
lip stick
make up
news paper
pass word
pine apple
pot hole
work place
- hedge hog
- Let's see some of them are their own words in our language. Blueprint is similar with it being combined from 2 words. Firework (fire thrower) and homesick (home sad) and newspaper (time write) are in the same boat. Pothole and workplace are 2 word phrases however. Road hole and working place.
  
  I'm sure you can find a lot of parallels in Europe since English shares a lot with Germanic and Latin languages but what I mean is any language could easily have a single dedicated word for it and these would relatively sound funny.
  for example you could imagine a language having "extinguisher" as a job title, which makes sense, but then you'd say "in English they call extinguishers 'people who fight fire' like they're fucking boxing isn't that funny"
  but also I don't know maybe it's because I'm fascinated by language I don't actually think it's funny. I think sick people house makes a lot of sense. much more than hospital to be honest, which means guest house, which is more appropriate for a hotel, which shares etymology with hospital!
- be cause

Theres one big difference between German and English. German allows you to just take multiple words and pack them into one word. This is a ~~bug~~ feature English does not have(or at least not to this extend). That's also the reason why its sometimes very hard to translate some gean words because you have to split them up and then translate them individually.

Childless but many of my friends have kids and seeing that top panel... Just... lol.
"this is a tool, not a toy"
How many times have I heard that said, or even said it myself, to children.
- Your point being?

German is weird in more ways, namely word ordering
Sie dürfen nicht ein Feuerzeug mit ins Flugzeug nehmen
You're not allowed to a fire stuff with you in flight stuff bring
But all languages are weird. Here's some french for you
qu'est-ce que c'est?
I don't have the knowledge needed to translate this properly but it's something like "wh'is-at what that is" (its the way they say "what is that")
And Swedish, my native language
I eftermiddags åt jag jordgubbar. Nu ska jag äta middag.
This after middle day ate i soil old men. Now I'm going to eat middle day. (This afternoon I ate strawberrys. Now I'm going to eat dinner)
Given that Swedish is my native language I'd also like to inform you that the English word "smorgasbord" is completely ridiculous. It's literally just the Swedish word "smörgåsdsbord" but without å and ö, so it's pronounced completely wrong. The word smörgås is however also a bit weird, it literally means "butter goose". So your English word smorgasbord means "butter goose table". Also window means wind eye, it's the old Swedish word "vindöga"
- No german would ever talk like that. Correct would be "Sie dürfen keine Feuerzeuge mit ins Flugzeug nehmen" (You are not allowed to bring lighters into the aircraft).
  
  Thanks! My German isn't that good. I've been studying it for four years but sometimes it feels like we're getting nowhere.
  
  I’ll try:
  You allowed not one fire thing with into flight thing bring.
- German is weird in more ways, namely word ordering
  Nope, germanic was first, you guys did it weird.
  Btw,
  Sie dürfen nicht ein Feuerzeug mit ins Flugzeug nehmen
  that would be
  You're allowed not a fire tool with in flight tool bring
  No?
  
  Yes, that's true
- Wouldn’t it be
  Now will I eat middle day
  ?
  
  Yeah, that may be a better translation

Needs more hand shoes.

I've learned that
Hospital = Krankenhaus = Sick House
Ambulance = Krankenwagen = Sick Wagon
It actually makes sense.
English has “plaything”, which is kinda similar.
- Krankenhaus - die Kranken (the sick persons from krank meaning sick) and das Haus (the house). A Krakenhaus could maybe be found at an aquarium as it's a house of octopuses (release the kraken!). Octopuses are more commonly called Tintenfisch tho, which literally means ink fish.
- Fun fact the term Hospital while derived from hospitality is mutated for context due to the Knights Hospitallers. They built quite a few outposts that quickly became associated with medicine because pilgrims are stupid.

Toy = Spielzeug = Play Stuff
English has “plaything”, which is kinda similar.

I like the art style!
I find medical terms are fun like that in their own right. A lot of them follow a similar structure with Greek/Latin pieces. Then others have fun origins depending on how we thought the body worked way back when
- Thank you! Yeah, I find the translated medical terms exceptionally funny in German (though doctors will also use the latin terms a lot).

Witzig, sehr witzig
- Ich bedanke mich.

I love shield-toads! 🐢
- What about naked-snails?

飞机 = Flying Machine
打火机 = Fight Fire Machine (wtf lol)
玩具 = Play Device(?)
工具 = Work Device
救护车 = Save-Protect Car/Cart (SPC? SCP? 🤔 Ambulances are an SCP confirmed?!?)
Edit: Also
救命 = Save Life (Much better than "Help", English is lame)
- You forgot
  火车 (fire car) = train
  手机 (hand machine) = cellphone
  
  JīJī = [Redacted due to NSFW]
  (I have no idea what the characters is supposed to look like, I just hear people say it 🤭)
- The 打 in 打火機 is more like hit in this context. Makes a bit more sense with the way older lighters required you to flick it. But 打 is also used in a ton of contexts haha.

"Stuff" should be translated as "tool", IMO.
- Or thing.
  Either is a better translation than stuff.
  
  Thing is litterally Ding in German. The term Zeug on its own stands for for all the stuff you need to have at hand to perform some task.
- While tool is great, I would say "gear" fits even better, does make sense as well.
  
  I agree. As I've mentioned, 'stuff' has more the meaning of Kram.
- Tool is Werkzeug (work stuff). "Zeug" is a filler word for when you don't remember the name so it fits.

German... the Language of Love

This actually helped me understand a little more why Germans I've met are so matter-of-fact and talk in flat statements without nuance.

At first I thought that in the last pannel the robot gives the child 'soup for my family'

!i_itrl@feddit.org has a leak sprung!

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