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[–] 29 points 11 months ago* (6 children)

The german word for airplane literally just translates to "flying thing."

Also the word fot lighter is "fire thing."

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  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago

    The beauty of agglutination. New words can be created without new vocabulary, sometimes regardless of technological changes. In Esperanto, there is no dedicated word for “cell phone”, but a word is needed to refer to these devices, so it’s “poŝtelefono”, or “pocket phone”.

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  • [–] 18 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    The English word means flying flat thing. Naming new things for a society is hard. Think about the word movie. It's absolutely hilarious.

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  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago

    I think the difference with that English word - and indeed many like it in English - is that it's wearing a disguise borrowed from another language (Latin, at least in part, in this case). German has fewer pretensions.

    But where English does have a word made up of native, undisguised parts, we don't realise we're probably thinking about those words the same way Germans do with theirs. That is, we don't really think about the deconstruction unless we're explicitly asked to, or something unusual triggers an etymological enlightenment.

    Or else we had that enlightenment long ago and it's no longer exciting, I guess.

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  • It regretfully is not called hand socks.

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  • [–] 11 points 11 months ago
    [–] 10 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    The word "humans" in Swedish is similar:

    We say "människor", which is we split it up a bit becomes:

    "Män" "i" "skor", or translated:

    "Men" "in" "shoes"

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  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    We Dutch never get credit for doing/sounding almost the same.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago*

    🇧🇷 Luvas (loo-vas)

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Why is the mime so surprised though?

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  • [+] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)