Well, Dad certainly does have good lungs.
Yiddish is a very, ah, colorful language.
Yiddish is a very, ah, colorful language.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Please rate me!
Rate Me on BlogHop.com!
help?
The View From Here Contributor
Listings
About The Author
- Brigid
- 'armpit of nowhere', North Dakota, United States
- I'm Brigid, not my birth-name, but the one I chose for Confirmation. It's a Catholic thing. Want to learn more about how I grew up? Check out my semi-autobiographical webcomic, Mary Quite Contrary. The closest I've come to earning a living as a writer is one summer I worked as a feature columnist for a small-town newspaper. I've been telling and writing stories my whole life, though, and, hey, it's something I enjoy. Whether I manage to make a buck at it isn't that important to me.
13 comments:
Well, it is something of a hybrid of Hebrew (Hebraic?) and German. German, as you've noted previously, has never exactly been what one might call a pretty language in the first place. And there is a Russian proverb which says something to the effect of "Enough to make a German puke" (and this despite the fact that Russian is often put right up there next to French as the greatest language to "swear or make love with").
Again, I needn't hesitate to point this out, because a sizable portion of my DNA is German. :D
@Dan: I'm not sure which is the correct technical term, but I think Hebrew works fine and is easier to say. Ye hus, but our ancestors were an interesting lot.
Dang, I forgot to title this post.
Oh, boy: I remember - now - some of the words in that book. Which I hadn't, when I gave the okay for you to borrow it.
As some of my Norwegian forebears would have said, "I get so quick old, and so slow smart."
@Dad: Yeah. It was... interesting.
Hee! I can so see Brigid blushing and going back to dad to comment on some of the words in that. =^-^=
Ah, innocence. Never lose it, lass. *ruffles Brigid's hair*
@Robert: Thank you. I've certainly made an effort to maintain innocence without being completely naive. ^_^
Brian -- my (German) ancestors told me that was an old German saying!
"Too soon oldt, und too late shmart."
:)
(I feel it too...)
peace,
Zach
@Zach: The only German phrase that I know (in the original German, anyway, without having to look it up or that isn't just a horrible pun that sounds like it might be Germanic, but really isn't) is "Leb schnell, lieb heftig, stirb young" ("Live fast, love hard, die young"). And I may not be spelling that right.
@Dan - my Grandfather was the last who actually knew German. The only phrase I learned was gesundheit. :)
@Zach: You can add this to the list. Dummkopf. That word is used a lot with my family.
@Brigid: I think dummkopf is rather more a word than a phrase, isn't it? Although my understanding has long been that German speakers don't so much invent new words as they just string old words together, so I guess in a sense you could have both a phrase and a word... :D
@Zach: My dear old grandpa, a professional fire-fighter by trade who spent a large part of his working life on call at the town fire station, surrounded by other quasi-bachelor blue-collar types (men who, married or not, weren't exactly enjoying the company of the fairer sex while they were on duty, and whose manners, small doubt, weren't exactly Emily Post; we've all heard the old saw about someone "swearing like a sailor", after all), had a favorite joke about the meaning of gesundheit. Rather tasteless, actually, once I lost sufficient innocent to realize what the pun meant, but then grandpa was always a bit of a scamp... :P
@Dan: True, true. I don't think I know any German phrases, per say. I can hum a few folk tunes, but that's about it.
One of my grandpas was a sailor. He managed to keep his mouth pretty clean around us kids, but he could be rather impish, too.
Zach,
I suspect it may be German and Scandinavian. There isn't much water separating the countries - and national borders are a comparatively recent development in Europe.
The basic idea is probably found in most cultures.
Thanks for sharing that, BTW.
Post a Comment