Freaky German Language Rules!

Following on from my comments about my German lessons in the "Stoopid Translation" thread...

...How the hell can "breakfast" be a bloody verb?!?!

Anyone got any better examples of really confusing lingual stupidity?!?!

yo bloke ...

frühstücken ... to eat breakfast ... easy innit ???

Apparently not - It's "to breakfast". The verb in your sentence is "eat". Basically in German you breakfast - You don't eat breakfast:wacko:
That's what my German teacher tells me anyway!

cats EAT their breakfast ... sorry ...

At least they don't say "Mittagessen tun"...

I don't think I'll ever get over the 1st time that I saw everyone walking around saying "Mahlzeit" to me.

It took about 3 months of explanations to work out what they were doing/saying.

Frühstuck - Noun (Substantiv)
frühstucken - Verb

This type of noun-verb relationship is common in German

Ausgabe - ausgeben
Missbrauch - missbrauchen
Leim - leimen
Lehre - lehren

To name just a few.


This is a strange one. When I first heard this I thought it was like a reminder that it was lunchtime, which sounds really stupid when someone says it to you when you are already eating.

German - A bit like English but without the spacebar.

At this juncture in the procedings I'd just like to mention my favourite German word at the moment:

fiktiv

It's the pronunciation that gets me -- fick tief.

Don't you just love the short and precise way you can say things in German:

German:

Ich hatte eine Auseinandersetzung mit meiner Lebensabschnittsgefährtin wegen ihren Anpassungsschwierigkeiten an meinen Alkoholmissbrauch.

English:

I came home pissed from the pub and got into trouble.

The worst is the Der, Die, Das rule every Germany I asked about that rule said it was stupid and even they didn't know it fully

Don't worry in 100 years the German laynguage will have disappeared anyway.

My favourite German phrase of the moment is Schiebe Hebe Dach (sp?) when I bought my car it had one and every time the guy said it, he sounded like the Swedish chef

Frow dee chickin in dee air...

He was much better than "Pigs in Space" - Him and Beaker the scientist's assistant.

The nice thing about the German language is that you can make up words very easily. My fave at the moment is "to send a text message - smsen" (pronounced zymzen)

ich smse
du sms(e)st
er/sie smst
wie smsen

etc etc

ich habe Dir gesmst

Fantastic!

It was reported to me this morning that our Office Manager had not done any work but had "gegoogelt" yesterday afternoon - now thats another good one !

This is language gone "maaaad in the heeeeeeed"!

Hehe! We have a little "running gag" here in the dept making up new verbs for when our articles and communications have to be first authorised/verified/certfified by our bosses.

eg. boss' surname + (i)fizieren (of course not all surnames are suitable for this "conjugation")

"Ist der Artikel schon müllerfiziert/schmidtifiziert/jägerfiziert worden?" etc

or

"Erst muß die Präsentation durch den Jägerfizierungsprozeß durchgehen"

I know it's a bit silly, but sometimes even I get startled by the Germans surprisingly funny sense of humour! Then again, I guess you would have to know our bosses in order to appreciate the humour here

Working in IT, you can germanise most anything. Some of the ones I have heard:

gecustomised
geimported (even though importiert is better)
gedownloaded

Other ones I've often heard:

gefighted
gehandicapped

I think nowadays you can get away a lot with the ge + english past participle!!!

gebrainstormed
gechanged
gefarted...no just kidding

Should that not be guffarted?

well, I'm currently downloading the SP2 update and just checked how far it was: "Updates werden gedownloadet: 0%"

You beat me to it alibi, I saw a lot of that last weekend!

Christmas is also a verb - "es weihnachtet"

You're shitting me!...Er...sorry wrong thread.

oh yeah...es weihnachtet sehr...

Of course that begs the question

Wer weihnachtet mit wem?

How about a classic Boris Becker tennis muck-up

Erst hat er GEbreakT und dann habe ich REGEbreakT

(talking about breaking someones service!!!)

Be gentle with our german friends for they are but infants in a
world of linguistic wisdom

Mike

Isn't 'hieruntergeladen' the equivalent of 'download' in German?

Yep.

Download - herunterladen
Upload - hochladen

As I'm a linguistic lazy bugger though, I only tend to use uploaden and downloaden

Then of course there's the new German verb meaning "to blow up"

...binladen



Tough crowd