ie toaster, can opener, ice maker
Chinese is incredible for this
airplane is flying machine, your cell phone is your hand machine, assassin is kill hand, computer is electric brain
German has “hand shoes” (gloves) and “shield toads” (turtles)
the Japanese word for socks is “undershoes”
Makes sense, English has underpants and undershirts
“Sick car” (ambulance)
KRANKENWAGEN
hell yes I knew this one and forgot
And “flying thing” for plane.
Japanese has “kubi” (neck), “tekubi” (wrist, literally “hand neck”), “ashikubi” (ankle, literally “leg neck”) and “chikubi” (nipple, literally “breast neck”)
hungarian calls the foot the leg-head…
Think on your feet!
Electric brain sounds rad as fuck.
To be fair I guess to compute something (hence the name computer) is brain related, not as bad ass tho
also movies are literally called electric shadows in mandarin, which goes hard
Death to America
In Poland, before computers became much more widespread, they were called “Electron Brains” (Mózg Elektronowy). Nowadays they are just computers.
Germans calling gloves “hand-shoes” will never not be funny to me. Similarly, they have so many literal names for things. Suicide is self-muder, airplane is fly-thing, gums are tooth-meat.
German’s my second language, and just the other day I heard a new term while playing a game that was so literal I didn’t need a dictionary. I wish I could remember what it was.
Oh I don’t like tooth meat at all
Swedish is exactly the same for the examples you brought upp, but we share a lot with german so its checks out i guess…
Why isn’t it called a teethbrush?
In English the singular is used when modifying another noun like that. For example, a trainer of dogs is a dog trainer, opener of cans is a can opener, a podiatrist a foot doctor, a ball you kick with your feet is a football, etc.
The real question is why does english persist with so many different ways to make plural words
If you have multiple toothbrush you have teethbrush, like lieutenants-general
you don’t have a seperate brush for each tooth? fucking commies smh
Stalin ate all of the teethbrushes himself so now we’re left with toothbrushes (which we have to share because communism)
You gonna love bird names
Booby, Cocks-of-the-Rock, Secretarybird… hmm
animal and plant names are terrible in any language, but it’s soooo much worse when you’re trying to remember them in two languages at once…
i kinda know what a pocok is, but what the fuck is that in english? what’s a stoat in hungarian? what about a beech? i probably know its name in hungarian, but i cant connect it to the english names…
I love how owls do nothing but owl
They call em fingers but I’ve never seen em fing.
They call them digits but I never seen them count
Butchers are sometimes butch.
German is pretty famous for this, but we do it a lot in English too. We just don’t concatenate our words and have lots of loan words
I wish maths had this for names. I don’t want to remember mathematicians names.
Just gotta remember euler and that’s like 90% of stuff 👍
Literally everything should be like this, fuck naming stuff after a person. Most of the time it’s just the first white dude who wrote about the thing anyway. Animals, theories, buildings, rename all of it
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
That show was wild
I like how Brits and North American Anglos both find each other’s version of washing-up liquid/dish soap hilariously literal
pain killers is a funny one to me
