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If German was English (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/comicstrips@lemmy.world
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[–] 76 points 2 years ago (8 children)

Isn't English the amalgamation of like 5 different languages and if everything were broken down like this, English would sound just as ridiculous?

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  • [–] 55 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I think every language probably sounds silly if transliterated into another language

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  • [–] 54 points 2 years ago*

    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 :)

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    a language would sound the same when transliterated to another language

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Eh, not totally. Some languages have phonemes that are completely absent in other languages, and some phonemes (especially vowels, though sometimes consonants, eg: "r") are different enough that a transliteration can never do them justice. Although, I guess transliterating into the international phonetic alphabet would do the trick...

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  • [–] [S] 29 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I only did three months of research for this comic. Guess it still wasn't enough. Verdammte Bullenscheiße!

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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
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  • [–] 22 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    My favorite English compound word is bookkeeper. 3 consecutive double letters.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Coincidentally, I just watched a video on that sort of thing the other day that was pretty neat: Anglish: English without the 'foreign' bits

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    I oversimplified a bit! Sorry!

    Words always shift over time and borders. The words "recu" and "receive/receipt" are pretty close and used to be closer. To be more accurate it was "receite" when they adopted it from French. Compared to Latin "recepta" which has a hard P in it. So adding "P" from Latin to the spelling as "receipt" but leaving the pronunciation as Anglo-French "receite" was the most silly part.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Well, English is always silly with the various silent letters. The worst are the silent letters that nonetheless change the pronunciation of the non-silent letters nearby.

    Like, I saw a place today named "something-valu", with no "e" on the end. With no "e" it should really be pronounced "valoo". Adding the "e" somehow changes it to "valyoo". Rather than changing the vowel sound, it adds a consonant-like /j/ sound (IPA) to the start of that syllable.

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