[Multilingual Monday] Linguistic Screwups

[aadroma]

First off: Balashon is a great Hebrew language source. It covers words in modern Hebrew and why they are used. As you know, the revival of the Hebrew language as a spoken living language has been fascinating to watch blossom as it adapts to the modern world, and the site (which, sadly, doesn't seem to be getting updated anymore) has some great

Comments

[pne]

Then of course, there’s always the influence of dialects which don’t agree with the written standard completely.

And sometimes you’ve got words which sound identical and are written differently (as far as I know) only to make a distinction between them in writing, without a particular etymological clue as to which is which, such as Lerche and Lärche in German. One’s a tree and one’s a bird (larch and lark, I think), but I’m not completely sure which is which (partly because I rarely talk about specific trees or birds). I think that Lerche is the lark (bird), though, and Lärche the larch (tree).

[pne]

(I think the elephant/statue is zou, not sou; and it’s Balashon and not Bashalon.)

[aadroma]

Fixed fixed. Helps if I proofread before posting.

[muckefuck]

That German list is definitely for learners. IME, Germans seldom mix up umlauted and unumlauted words, whereas learners do this all the time. (I still have problems with drucken vs drücken despite refreshing the distinction a hundred goddamn times.)

Common "mistakes" (bzw. "innovative usages") from native speakers include confusing geistlich (clerical, theological) and geistig (spiritual, mental); langweilig "boring" with gelangweilt "bored"; gütig "graciously" with gütlich "amicably" ;and bedenkenlos "unhesitatingly" with gedankenlos "thoughtlessly". Then there are, as pne, instances of dialect interference, like confusing lehren "teach" and lernen "learn". (Some dialects use the same verb for both.) Similarly, leihen "loan" and verleihen "borrow". (Cf. dial. English "Borrow me a pen, will you?")

In Alemannic, wie "as" is used in comparisons where one would expect als "than", and this carries over into their Hochdeutsch. Less commonly, you'll hear wo in relative clauses where Alemannic has wu but Standard German has forms of der.