I love how paperclips are called trombones in french

list other fun translations for things.

French is great for this - chauve-souris as bat. Because obviously the most obvious thing about a bat is that it's bald, and not the fact it can fly.

cars are called 'steam vehicles' or 'vapor cars' in chinese

germans are the best for this! i'm sure there's a thread that mentions some of them

the 1 i remember - nipples = breast warts

tbh english is pretty great for this as well. lot of words that are odd that don't seem odd to us. will have to dwell on this.

99 luftballon.

Air balloons. So's you don't mistake them for the other kind.

I mean, all languages are pretty weird and things get grandfathered and blah blah blah linguistics

German uses "Nippel" as well as "Brustwarze" so at first I had no idea what just sayin was talking about

Vachement Chouette = Cowly Owl = Really great

Muckefuck is German for faux coffee/coffee substitute.

Boite a musique? (What time is it?)
Twelve Thirty
Ton cul vieille mouche (thank you very much)

Un petit d'un petit...

French is great for word games of course. You used to get all those "on ne dit pas..." jokes inside Carambar wrappers.

Haven't had a Carambar for about 6 years :-(

in french the old crude T-bar ski lifts that you hardly ever see any more are called "butt pullers"

Stinktier = skunk

Cheese burger, in Hungarian, is pronounced "Shiteburger"

I love "entrejambe" for "crotch" because a) crotch! & b) it is so blunt: your crotch is your "between the legs". I know German is full of this kind of smooshing word thing but still.

http://www.artvalue.com/photos/auction/0/46/46246/man-ray-radnitsky-emmanuel-189-allume-tes-gitanes-2311553-500-500-2311553.jpg

Allume tes gitanes

Spanish: "madreselva" means "honeysuckle," literally "mother-jungle."
Portuguese: "beija-flor" means "hummingbird," literally "kiss-flower."

More from Spanish:
(a) quemarropa - (at)point blank range - "to burn clothing"

and those two that are similar to but seems more striking than the English version
rompecabezas - brain-teaser, puzzle - "breaker of heads"
asaltacunas - cradle robber - "assaulter of cradles"

i was told once that the spanish for speedbump is "lying-down policeman"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_policeman

French for honeysuckle is chèvrefeuille - goat leaf.
French for gooseberry is groseille à maquereau - mackerel berries.

German for fried egg is spiegelei - mirror egg.

Old (I think) German word for psychiatrist or psychologist is Seelenarzt- soul doctor. Although maybe this is just slang and shouldn't count.

Bahasa Malay has some great re-spellings of words borrowed from English. Sorry I mean INGGERIS! <3

wow did I ever misread that

Dandelion, from old French dent de lion (lion's tooth) is now called pissenlit. There is a variant name for it in English that perfectly translates the newer French term: pissabed. If you've ever had a dandelion salad, you can probably attest to its diuretic qualities.

haha that is awesome.

Do they have a nickname for watermelon along the same lines?

pasteque

hmm sort of sounds like "piss-take?"

in spanish, toes are dedos del pie (fingers of the foot)

we called them pee the beds when i was a child! (in scotland) xxxpost

Pastèque always makes me think pas steak, 'not steak'.

There are apparently a lot of languages where there's a 'vulgar' variant referring to how they make one micturate, jed.

I like how cloudy is "trouble" in French

a food processor in french is a ROBOT DE CUISINE

I like how cloudy is "trouble" in French

Only for liquids, though. A cloudy sky is couvert or nuageux.

i always liked 'aardappel' as the dutch word for potato - earth apple!

food processor

or robot ménager

Donna it's the same in French too!

pomme de terre

hah, right! forgot that.

though i think "aardappel" is more fun to say aloud

identkit in French is robot-portrait, no?

Portrait robot yeah.

Like to sing "aardapfel" to the tune of "Earth Angel"

in Austria and Bavaria a potato is also sometimes called an "Erdapfel" or "Erdbirne" (earth pear)

similarly, aardbei/Erdbeer for strawberry and aardnoot/Erdnuss for peanut (guess this is not so wacky since we call it a groundnut too - and in a way straw-berry is a weirder name than ground-berry)

Tomatoes used to be pommes d'amour (though confusingly this also means candy apple). Pomme is modified a lot for round fruits or veg in French. Pomme de pin, pomme de grenade (hence our pomagranate)...

wkiw

i thought trombones was some cind of instrument

btw the name for america in chinese is 'beautiful country'

― br8080 (dayo), Friday, 29 April 2011 10:45 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

a phonetic accident surely, otherwise france would be "law country"

― it always seems to have dick smith in it (Autumn Almanac), Friday, 29 April 2011 22:58 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

and England/UK 'brave country'!

YINGGUO

or Yinggwok (learning Cantonese here, not Mandarin)

Germany is virtuous country

Australia is some shit to do with inlets

Also like how the name for The Beatles in Cantonese (pei tau sei) both works as a transliteration and means something like messy hair four.

The most common way to refer to a bruise in French is to call it a blue, un bleu.

And in dutch it means something completely different.

French for a tip is "pourboire" (pour + boire) which means for drinking, as in money you give the waiter to pay himself a drink. Same thing with vinegar - vinaigre - which is a concatenation of vin (wine) and aigre (sour). I remember finding it funny when I noticed that.

To be hung over in Spanish is the be "crudo," which is right on.

Also, glasses are sometimes called "anteojos" which means "before (in front of) eyes."

xpost my friend and I used to say we were feeling "crude" when we were hungover. Crudo actually means raw though. Mexican Spanish uses "pedo" for drunk sometimes, which is the word for fart.

And many xposts:

The way the French abuse English gerunds always makes me smile:

un parking - a car park
un camping - a campsite
un jogging - a tracksuit
un smoking - a dinner jacket
le fooding - gastronomy, being a foodie

Spanish does this a lot too, abusing them even worse than the French: Parking, Camping and Esmoquin (smoking) are used the same way, plus "puenting" for bungee jumping ("puente"=bridge) and my personal favorite/most horrifying "footing" meaning jogging!

"le footing" is also used by the French iirc.

it is indeed

Le babyfoot = table football

In Chilean Spanish table football is called taca taca.

Nostrils in Spanish : las ventanillas de la nariz. The little windows of the nose.

En español they also say "hasta las narices" to mean fed up/ up to HERE with someone something. It literally means up to the noses and why it's plural is beyond me.

And foosball/table football is called futbolín (a diminutive of just plain fútbol) in Spanish Spanish

The Czech expression for "hair of the dog" is "vyprošťovák", which is one of those trucks that tows your car out of a ditch.
Fireworks is "ohni stroje" which translates to "fire machines".

The literal English thread reminded me of another German one I always thought cute. Baumschule = nursery in the botanical sense. Tree school!

Same in Entish, right?

Is it?

Yeah, it is (and I found that a bit confusing when younger).

Ha MW - didn't realize that didn't say "English" until just now. :)

I love that chopsticks in French are baguettes

Baguette means wand in French.

I like ferretería - hardware store in Spanish, sounds like a store that sells ferrets.

Or a store that sells iron

I'm sure that's where the name actually comes from, even though the f turns into a silent h in Spanish and iron becomes hierro, but I just couldn't see that word without picturing little ferrets running around in the store

I always picture having to go past rows and rows of freestanding black iron railings and being forced to ask for wimpy little nickel nails

Last night I found out that the Chinese for black tea is "red tea".

I'm sure that's where the name actually comes from, even though the f turns into a silent h in Spanish and iron becomes hierro

Is this a regional thing? I know "fierro" (Mexican Spanish).

It's a pretty widespread consonant shift in Spanish when compared to other romance languages:

Eg hacer, hormiga, harto, if you swap the h out for an f you get pretty close to most of their cognates.

cigarette in welsh is "ffag".

Ah - Wordrefernce.com tells me that iron = "hierro," except in Latin America, where it's "fierro."

in french, the letter Y is called "i grec", which means "greek i"

In Spanish, too! "i griega"

It's weird that "ll" (doble ele (double el)) is a letter (as in one single letter) in the Spanish alphabet.

The real academia recently changed the name of y from y griega to 'ye'; though the Spanish speaking world has yet to take much notice.

Also, the Spanish double consonants (ch, rr and ll) are no longer listed separately in dictionaries. More's the pity.

In English, double u is a single letter!

In French a w is not a double u it is a double v (which makes more sense, when you look at the letter)

In English, double u is a single letter!

I know, but it is one character, it's two parts joined. Double L is not. It makes a difference to me.

Is "ch" a letter? I can't remember. What about "rr"?

'lawyer' and 'avocado' are the same word in french

It's kind of annoying when you want a good lawyer salad and they mess it up.

Is "ch" a letter? I can't remember. What about "rr"?

Pretty sure they had official letter status until around the mid-90s, when someone realised that it was stupid.

I dunno if this counts itt but when Afrikaans speakers see something cute like a fluffy kitten they go "SHAME!!" It means cute somehow.

I learned a good one in Greek class tonight: agreed (as in, "we should go to the pub tonight!" "Agreed!") is συμφώνη, which is pronounced like symphony -- though with stress on the second syllable. Greek can be pretty cool.

I suppose the roots of that would mean something like 'same sound', no? Very nice!