Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Gender Traffic
Recently I found out that in German the scientific term (one that for example gynaecologists use) for sex is Geschlechtsverkehr, which apart from not sounding great, if translated into English literally, means "gender traffic". No wonder there aren't enough babies being born here - parents are stuck in traffic! Can you imagine Italians calling sex gender traffic?! Even if they did it would be genere di traffico or traffico di genere (depending if you trust Babelfish or Google Translate more), which at least sounds a hell of a lot better!!!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Here's a question, o German speaker, what's the deal with the Russian word for a railway boom gate - "shlagbaum"? I presume that it's a borrowed German word (schlagbaum??) - my surviving year 11 German brain cell tells me that it means "hitting tree".. Is that right?
ReplyDeleteThat would be the literal translation. That is if you were to translate the verb 'schlagen' and 'baum' separately. There are a couple of different translations of 'schlagen', but all have to do with either hitting, knocking, or pulsating... so yeah :)
ReplyDeletehttp://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende&lang=de&searchLoc=0&cmpType=relaxed§Hdr=on&spellToler=on&chinese=both&pinyin=diacritic&search=schlagen&relink=on
Boom gates used to be made of trees or branches. Tree's being felled/falling down is where the concept and hence the word "falling/felled tree" comes from. "To fell a tree" in German is "ein Baum schlagen". The most common definition of "Schlagen" is "hitting", hence the misnomer "hitting tree".
ReplyDeleteWhy the Ruskis stole yet another word from the Germans - well let's just put it down to creativeness or a lack thereof ;-)
Schlagbaum ~ felled tree
ReplyDelete