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

And breakfast is 'morning food', lunch is 'afternoon food' and guess what dinner is? 'evening food'.

Similar in Finnish. Breakfast is aamupala (morning piece), supper is iltapala (evening piece) which my brother confused with the word for burn/burning 'palaa' and asked why we eat 'evening burning' 😂

I also like how after is evening-day (iltapäivä)

GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER · Yesterday 23:03

The Russian word for railway is voksahl - directly from ‘Vauxhall’, apparently because some U.K. workers who were employed on the first Russian railways were from Vauxhall, and the Russian workers heard them say it so often, they thought it meant ‘railway’.

It's zheleznaya doroga, voksal is slang for a station. According to my OH (a former Soviet citizen) it's because the Tsar visited the king and saw Vauxhall Railway Station and made the assumption that Vauxhall mean station.

Zheleznodorozhnaya stantsiya is the proper name for a railway station.

I’ll say it again, this isn’t true 😆

its ‘meicro-don’ which literally means ‘micro-wave’

Sorry, I know it’s less exciting.

While I know 'popty ping' was originally some sort of joke/urban myth , does anyone actually use it now?

How about gazunder?

Not in the sense of buying property, but the old-fashioned word for a chamber pot - literally named because it 'goes under' your bed!

German has a kind of similar concept, whereby something that's boring or just OK but nothing special is 'Wurst' - because sausages are such everyday, unexciting things!

"Das ist Wurst" i.e. "That is sausage".

Isn't there a variation that literally translates as 'face that is crying out for a fist'?

Faustpfeiffendesgesicht or something similar?!

Isn't it the case that most names of rivers effectively just mean 'river' in one language/dialect or another?

It makes sense, really, as historically, when human settlements were usually established near rivers and most people hardly ever travelled far their whole lives, why ever wouldn't you just call the only one that you knew 'the river' in your own language?

No-one I know does, if they’re Welsh they just spend their time correcting people who think it’s a real word 😂

Bumblebee is a good English one, I think semi-consciously cute. More interesting are the ones like skyscraper and clothes horse, whose picturesqueness we have lost sight of (just as my German tutor had lost sight of how strikingly direct Auspuff is for a car exhaust, and so couldn't see how it was anything special).

Wonderful as that is, it’s not the most common word for mustache, for that is the even more magnificent Schnurbart, or ‘string/cord beard’.

Skyscraper is such a good word, I do like it.
There's an apartment building in my town, that at one point was the tallest building in the town (its not tall, its only about 4 stories high, maybe 5, but back then it was a skyscraper to these small town people) and its named Pilvilinna - Cloud Castle, which I just love.

I'm learning Welsh and noticed today that the English 'penguin' when spoken sounds like the Welsh for 'white head' (pen gwyn). From googling, this might be where we get the name 'penguin' from!

That sent me to the wiki page, where I learned that - of course - a group of penguins on land is a waddle, and a group of penguins in the water is a raft.

Zheleznodorozhnaya stantsiya is the proper name for a railway station.

am now all nostalgic for one of my Russian A-level set books - Stantsiya Zima (Zima Junction) I must dig it out.

Late to the days of the week party, but German for Wednesday is also middle of the week (Mittwoch)

Commenting so I don't lose this thread.
Love all these, think I'll use some of the German ones for my Year 10s as a starter they like a good compound noun!

The English toothbrush moustache is pretty good.

Dutch

Pet - house animal

I love the German expression, "Das passt wie die Faust aufs Auge".

That fits like a fist in the eye.

It can either mean something fits perfectly, or (frequently) is used ironically to mean something doesn't fit at all! 😄

The English toothbrush moustache is pretty good.

Also handlebar moustache and of course the walrus moustache!

And breakfast is 'morning food', lunch is 'afternoon food' and guess what dinner is? 'evening food'.

Dutch does this too

All domesticated animals are 'house animals' in Iceland, though 'house' is also any building so it makes sense because farm animals do spend some time in buildings.

I went on a first aid course yesterday and learned a new word. Scalp is höfuðleður - head leather 😄

I'm not sure if English speakers always think about the literal meaning of 'breakfast'.

German too: Frühstück (early piece - and blimey, thanks to this thread i have suddenly made a connection between my Scottish friend calling his lunchtime sandwich a piece - or is that wrong? any linguists know?), Mittagsessen (midday food/eating) and Abendmahl (evening grind - describes the grinding of the teeth while eating) or the very specific, and totally accurate Abendbrot (evening bread)

And the greeting at lunchtime (not sure if it happens outside the Rheinland which is where i am?) "Mahlzeit" - grinding (as in chewing) time!

Wow what a good example. I don't think many people will have realised this. The pronunciation hides it, though.