[Multilingual Monday] Faux English

[aadroma]

It's a short one today. Yes, still doing card work, which means it'll be late. Again. :: laugh

Comments

Etymology is difficult sometimes.

[caestus]

I'm fascinated that salaryman is Japlish. I had no idea. I've only ever heard it in a non-Japanese setting with monolingual anglophones

Re: Etymology is difficult sometimes.

[muckefuck]

"Long time no see" is fascinating to me, since it's one of only a handful of genuine pidgin expressions that have been incorporated into the mainstream of the language. The source is Chinese Pidgin English (essentially English words with Chinese syntax) and the phrase is a straighforward calque of 好久不見. [See the link above for other examples.]

Ouais, je le sais, hein! 對了!

[caestus]

It is a fascinating calque and perhaps my most favourite because it is so unusual that not only would it be adopted at all but that it has flourished.

Wikipedia is surprisingly, consistently good with such topics.

[progbear]

There seems to have been a weird German hippie patois that built around the “psychedelic drugs and Krautrock” culture of the 1970s. Apart from ausgeflippt (a Germanization of “flipped out”), there’s the totally weird (from an English-speaking standpoint) usage of the English word Shit to mean “marijuana.”

[chukspace]

Have you never heard the phrase "Man, that's some good shit!" about marijuana?

[aadroma]

But those two words are just loan words, and not "English-ish words we made up." And yeah, at least standard Arabic is full of loans -- "fax", "telephone", "modem", etc.

there is a separate Arabic word for computer, but I think I used it once

Could it be the "standard Arabic"-"colloquial Arabic" difference at play here? I know there are plenty of things that I could say in standard Arabic, but would never say to another person because no one really talks in that matter to someone else.

ordered a lightly grilled weasel (+12 points if you know that ref)

Isn't that Hitchhikers' Guide?

[muckefuck]

There's been plenty of debate over the years whether "Handy" is truly a German invention or a genuine English term of brief and limited currency that made the jump before perishing. An accepted example of the later would be "smoking", which was used elliptically for "smoking-jacket" among some posh English types a century ago and in that form was adopted into French and, from there, to most European languages (undergoing in the process a shift in meaning to "tuxedo").

One of the words my German friends were most surprised to discover was pseudo-English is das Happy End; I've never figured out how exactly it lost its -ing. I was always amused by Twens, coined by analogy with Teens, since most of the Scheinanglizismen aren't that clever. Speaking of which, Wikipedia has a nice list in the article on Denglish. One trendy borrowing that confused me for a long time was die City. Until someone explained that it was a zippier synonym for das Stadtzentrum it just seemed egregiously gratuitous.

[progbear]

Thought of some others:

camping (French, Spanish, Dutch) = campground
wáter (Spanish) = toilet (from “water-closet”)
ώτοστοπ (autostop) (Greek) = hitchhiking

I remember also being amused that the German translation for the title of Not Another Teen Movie was Nicht noch ein Teeniefilm.

[gorkabear]

Add
- "párking" for parking space (but one you pay for), which is "garaje" (a word that comes from French) in some places or "cochera" in the south.

- Autoestop/Autostop is also used in Spain

Gosh, and I always notice a few ones I can't remember now :(

[muckefuck]

I've heard "a parking" used to mean "parking space" among some non-native speakers of English from Asia, but generally in the sense of "on-street parking space", e.g. "it is difficult to find a parking". Amuses me every time!