[Multilingual Monday] Anniversary

[aadroma]

On April 11th, 2005 -- little more than five years ago. I did my first Multilingual Monday column, and five years later, I've been (fairly) consistent at making a weekly MM post, getting inspiration from my fellow linguiaphile friends and events in my daily life. I loved having lingual elements in my journal and wanted a place where I could put it

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[gorkabear]

There's a very similar joke in Spanish. When someone leaves the fly button open we say "¡Tienes la farmacia de guardia!". Bear into account that pharmacies are a highly regulated business here, not like in the US when they open 24h a day. At night or during weekends, just certain pharmacies remain open ("de guardia

[muckefuck]

Pretty much all the German jokes I know work like that. Stop me if you've heard this one:Ein Mantafahrer fährt in die Stadt, um einkaufen zu gehen.
"Ey, Alter, wo geht's hier nach Aldi?"
"Zu Aldi!"
"Schon so spät?"

A Manta driver drives into town to go shopping.
"Hey, Old Man, how do you get at Aldi here?"
"To Aldi!"
"Already so late?"
The untranslatable pun at the heart of the punchline is zu "to" being also short for zugemacht "closed". But that's only one of the problems with trying to translate this joke. First and foremost, there's the stereotype of the Manta driver, which maps pretty well to the "hoosier" stereotype in St Louis and almost as well to the "guido" stereotype in NYC, but I'm never sure what term to use here in Chicago. Associated with that stereotype are certain non-standard usages considered "sloppy" by other German-speakers, such as the extended use of nach typified here. (You've studied German so you know a thing or two about the headache that comes from trying to select the proper word for "to"; there's a handy

[muckefuck]

Also, I don't know if you follow arktos62, but he just posted about a joke like this. Is that where you got the idea?

[strongaxe]

Years ago I was taking a course in conversational Hebrew at a local JCC, and just before Thanksgiving we had a cartoon showing a family sitting around a dining room table.
The father starts to say "Hodu Lashem...",
but the young boy interrupts and says "Lo! Li! Li!".

In English, this would translate as:
Thank God... and/or The turkey belongs to God
No! It's mine! mine!

There is a Hebrew pun on Hodu which means both thank and turkey, but it is totally lost in English.

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[anonymous]

Really love all these stories.. have been reading them daily. Please add more if you have any… Thanks a lot again for this awesome work.