Your favourite foreign words with literal meanings

[Brefugee]

We were chatting about this on The Archers thread and i wondered if anyone else would like to join the convo.

I can't remember how it came about but anyway, two of my favourites are

• The Russian for machine-gun translates literally to bullet thrower
• The German for gloves translates literally to hand shoes

Skyscraper itself is a word that means scraper of the sky.

My Dutch friend had a good laugh at Hairdresser and Clothes horse.

My favourite is boit sans soif. French drink without thirst - getting drunk.

@Ilovegermany I want all slugs to die, so that works well in both languages 😁.

From now on I will only ever use the grass fighting machine. The lawnmower is no more.

The Greek for summer literally is "good weather". (Lucky them.)

The old East Germany was particularly good for very literal Germanic names for devices, presumably because the more modern Latinate/Greek derived terms were decadent capitalist bullshit. So the sign above a telephone box was Fernsprecher (distance speaker) and a cassette recorder was known as a Tonbandgerät (sound band device). Photocopying was known as ablichten, which would very roughly approximate to ‘of/from light’.

And yes, a hovercraft is a Luftkissenfahrzeug, or an ‘air cushion travel thing’, but a lot of people would boringly say Hovercraft with a dodgy accent (Hoffercraeft) these days.

The piano translation is similar to pidgin English: “Old man in my house, hit him white teeth he laugh, hit him black teeth he cry”

Finnish is a good language for these

Computer - tietokone - knowledge machine
Aeroplane - lentokone - flight machine
Tights/stockings - sukkahousut - sock trousers
Fridge - jääkaappi - ice cupboard
Nitrous oxide - ilokaasu - joy gas (oh that one is very accurate!)
Fireworks - ilotulitus - joy firing

Dutch:

1. Squid = Inktvis (ink fish)
2. Kite = Vlieger (flier)
3. Kettle (as in appliance for making tea) = Waterkoker (water boiler)
4. Stiletto = Naaldhak (needle heel)
5. Ruler = Meetlat (measure slat)

Like in the German & Danish examples upthread, Dutch also has Moederkoek (placenta, in Dutch it is mother biscuit rather than cake) and Sinaasappelhuid (cellulite, orange skin).

Swedish words

Vegetable - green thing
Root vegetable - root thing
Straw - suck pipe
Tortoise - shield frog
Fridge - chill cupboard
Hangover -back drunk

Also
fart means speed
Slut means end
Fuck means pocket

Something unique about Icelandic is the days of the week. They had the normal Norse days until they Christianised and then in a fit of zeal decided to get rid of the ones that referred to Old Norse deities. So we have the inspiringly mundane:

Þriðjudagur (Tuesday) - third day
Miðvikudagur (Wednesday) - mid week day
Fimmtudagur (Thursday) - fifth day

Then there's föstudagur (Friday) - fasting day, but that's not quite as boring.

Leg is uterus, so we have legkaka (uterus cake - placenta, different from the mother cake elsewhere and even less appetising) and leggöng (uterus tunnel - vagina).

same here (West Germany) for telephone and tape/cassette recorder

IIRC in the Netherlands an iron translates as "stroking iron"?

"Icelandic for mole is moldvarpa - earth thrower. Probably similar to other Nordic languages since there are no moles here."

@Puffinshop "moldywarp" is also an archaic English term for mole.

Anyone who read Alison Uttley's "Little Grey Rabbit" books might remember the character Moldy Warp the Mole. I had always wondered why he was called that in the books, and thanks to you and this thread, now I know!

@Brefugee Yes to stroking iron. Which you use on a stroking board

German for vehicle exhaust is Auspuff (out-puff). I couldn't help laughing when I was with my German tutor and we came across this word, but she was not at all amused, couldn't see that it was funny. But as pointed out above, many English words (skyscraper was the example, for French gratteciel) are similarly picturesque when you analyse them, but we don't see it.

Probably the Latin original of 'exhaust' is the same (gasp out, anyone?).

I remember being entranced as a child when I realised that 'waistcoat' is a sort of coat that comes down to the waist, and that 'the seaside' is literally at the side of the sea.

Oh now you've taken me back to my first school on an RAF camp when I was five Gastropod. Our classroom was a wooden hut, fifty infants in a class, a wood stove and the teacher's black Labrador in the corner. Alison Uttley's Little Grey Rabbit and Ursula Moray Williams' Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse were read to us at the end of the day.

Such happy times, thank you for reminding me of them, 🥰

(And no, I'm not ancient 😂).

Just joining for more of these - they're fascinating.

That one I wish was used much more as it explains it so well.

Also God's little cow in Irish.

The Irish is leather wing.

Just thought of another Dutch one.

Puffin = Papegaaiduiker (Parrot diver)

Arabic for zebra translates as 'stripy horse' 😂

Another shout out for dandelion!

The word dandelion is from French dent de lion, in Medieval Latin dens leonis, meaning lion’s tooth, from the toothed outline of the leaves.

I love this thread!

x

I love the Korean dew-rain (drizzle) and the Finnish night-butterfly (moth),
cloud-drawer (skyscraper) and yankee-hedgehog (crew cut).

Banshee -
as Gaeilge bean sídhe = fairy woman