What is awesome in German?

und kein Fehler!

On Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:37:34 -0500, the infamous Wes 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

Let the Record show that Tim Wescott on or about Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:10:54 -0600 did write/type or cause to appear in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

"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.

pyotr

- pyotr filipivich We will drink no whiskey before its nine. It's eight fifty eight. Close enough!

It's really terrific how words evolve.

...

That's great (i.e., large).

Jerry

I saw that on a bumpersticker, on the back of a VW Jetta. In 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.

And get coded in song "Our God is an awesome God" will be sung for years.

I think he meant "awesome" as in a busload of preppies going off a cliff.... ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Hi Jim,

We know this ;-) A heavy discussed slogan for Baden-Württemberg is "Wir können alles - nur kein hochdeutsch" I'll Try in english "Yes we can, but not regular german" (Jörg, hab ich das einigermaßen richtig wiedergegeben?)

How do you say "intermodulation distortion" in German?

Intermodulationsverzerrung

Marte

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."

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.

Jerry

I've waited 36 years for an excuse to drop "Zundverteilerkopf" into a conversation.

jsw

'Verteilerkopf' =3D 'distributor head' is obvious. Can't figure out 'Zund' without a dictionary?

Rune

it means ignite or set something on fire but I already knew that z=FCndkerze means sparkplug so it was quite obvious :)

-Lasse

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

Norwegian "lyskaster", "lys" =3D "light", "kaste" =3D "throw"

Norw. "tennplugg", "tenn" =3D "ignite"

"Mutter" in Norwegian. There ought to be some interesting etymology here.

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. "=F8l" vs German "=F6l". The former means "beer", the latter "oil".

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.

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

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

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.)

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 ``språkvårdare'' 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!