Musings on Language #2

[dehro]

I was rather surprised when a bulgarian kid I gave lessons to burst out laughing when I called a curve a curva, which is the italian word for it..
apparently in bulgarian it has to do with women of negotiable affection, as Pratchett puts it.

[Eldan]

Originally Posted by historiasdeosos

I also love that Honda marketed the Fitta in Scandinavia.

I think the best car related one is still when they marketed the MR2 in France.

[GolemsVoice]

The English word "Gift" is a present. It's also the German word for "Poison".

I've once read a story of evacuated Jewish kids who were transported from Germany to England. Upon their arrival they saw a lot of "Gift Shops" and feared that it was all a trick and they would still be poisoned.

[HeadlessMermaid]

Originally Posted by Eldan

I think the best car related one is still when they marketed the MR2 in France.

Also, the French title of Jaws was "Les dents de la mer", which proved to be a problem when Jaws 2 came out.

I vaguely remember a friend of mine telling me that hey had to change the title completely, but according to IMDB, this is how they circumvented it: "Les dents de la mer, 2e partie". Heh.

[Goosefeather]

Originally Posted by Yora

One my mother told me is that Finns tend to mix up he and she for people, apparently because Finnish doesn't have that distinction. She's something like on the pannell for an annual baltic film festical and said she met a number of Finns who made the mistake.

I have several Romance-language-speaking friends who often misuse 'his' and 'her'. The problem being that possessive adjectives do use grammatical gender in their various languages, but agreeing with the gender of the thing or person possessed, not the one doing the possessing.

In French, for example, 'son père' could be either 'his father' or 'her father', while 'sa mère' could be either 'his mother' or 'her mother'. This leads them to say things like 'I saw Sarah yesterday. She was with his brother.'

For a similar reason, I often find myself having to stop and think whenever I use 'cuyo' (whose) in Spanish, to make sure it's agreeing with the correct person!

[SaintRidley]

As my Spanish linguistics professor gave it to me, the thing with embarazar is that it originally did mean to be embarrassed. It just got co-opted as a euphemism, and wound up becoming standard in that sense and its original meaning fading away.

[dehro]

ah..spanish..
burro is italian for butter.
and spanish for donkey

so..don't ask for donkey on your toast for breakfast