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Friday, 16 July 2004 13:46![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pneRandom memory: receiving my first letter from a French boy who would become my pen-friend. Part of his letter (in German) was "Meine Geschicklichkeit ist: [street + number, postal code, town]"; that is, in English, "My dexterity is: [street + number, postal code, town]".
While I knew what he meant, I wondered how he had come up with that word, but I had a suspicion. I looked up "Geschicklichkeit" in my German–French dictionary, and sure enough, it had "adresse" as one of the translations. I suppose he looked up the word in a F–G dictionary but didn't want to pick the cognate, so he went for the Germanic word—which, unfortunately, doesn't mean what he wanted :) "Adresse" is the only word I can think of in German that's used for "address" (place where something is).
Later on, I would write him letters in French and he would reply in German; we would then correct each other's letters and send them back with our next letter, as a way to practise.
Random fact: "Creo" in Spanish means both "I believe" and "I create". Fun when two verbs "interfere" in some of their forms. (It occasionally leads to confusion, as when many people use "lay" for "lie", or "laid" for "lay", in English, which still bugs me a little, and has made me unsure after hearing the form I consider wrong for so many years; "I lay on the bed all day yesterday" now seems strange to me, for example.)
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no subject
Date: Friday, 16 July 2004 05:46 (UTC)penpals
Date: Friday, 16 July 2004 06:34 (UTC)Ooh, I don't remember.
He was also a member of my church, so it may have been through that connection somehow... perhaps a returning missionary from France or something, or someone from France my mother met at the temple in Frankfurt. But I don't know any more where I got his address from or he mine.
I also had a Japanese penpal once, from Shizuoka-ken; she was the daughter of a man who had been my mother's penpal for a while many years ago. They had come into contact after he had come to Europe as a tourist and met my mother's brother there while he was in Hamburg, I believe.
I've been thinking I should do that (in French, and in German, really, since I'll be starting the latter next fall).
Well, if you want someone German, then try Letternet (http://www.deutschepost.de/dpag?check=yes&tpl=html3&lang=de_EN&xmlFile=52008)—a free pen pal club organised by the German postal service. They even have a little regular newsletter booklet you get which is bilingual in English and German: depending on which end you start at, you get one language or the other, until both converge in the middle with a list of addresses of penpals: usually a page of penpals wanting to correspond in English and a page of penpals wanting to correspond in German.
I'm not sure whether they do other languages, too, but it's certainly worth a shot if you want a German-speaking penpal.
I joined after hearing that
(The geek in me notes the component
&lang=de_ENin the URL and wonders... by my understanding of Internet technology, that means "German as spoken in 'EN'", but no country with code 'EN' exists. I suppose someone got confused from codes such as 'de_DE'—'German as spoken in Germany'—and replaced the wrong code. 'en_DE' would be 'English as spoken in Germany', which makes marginally more sense. Part of the problem is that there are two-letter language codes in ISO 639 and two-letter country codes in ISO 3166, but they're only sometimes the same. For example, 'de' is both 'Germany' and 'German', but, say, Japan is 'jp' while Japanese is 'ja'. And you have 'en' for English but no code for England; not surprising, really, since it's not a country at the global level, though there's 'gb' for the United Kingdom. Though on the Internet, the UK uses .uk for historical reasons, which is a whole 'nother kettle of fish, leading to ISO's reserving the country code 'uk' in ISO 3166.)Re: penpals
Date: Friday, 16 July 2004 06:46 (UTC)I have a couple Japanese pen pals; one stayed with me for a month, and then I stayed at her house for a month when I was in Japan.
I'd wondered about the "ja"/"jp" difference. Why does "gb" stand for the United Kingdom, instead of Great Britain? (Do I remember correctly that the United Kingdom is Great Britain plus Ireland?)
UK-related nomenclature
Date: Friday, 16 July 2004 08:41 (UTC)I don't really now. You'd have to ask ISO, I suppose.
But for example the ISO 4217 (?) currency symbols use ISO 3166 country codes, so the pound is GBP, not UKP.
(Do I remember correctly that the United Kingdom is Great Britain plus Ireland?)
That used to be the case until 1922 :)
UK = the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
The island of Ireland is divided between two countries: the greater part forms the Republic of Ireland, while the north-eastern corner belongs to the UK.
The nomenclature of the whole thing is pretty confusing.
See, for example, http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/gb.htm, http://alt-usage-english.org/whatistheuk.html, or http://alt-usage-english.org/english_british_uk_et_al.shtml for an (attempt at an) explanation.
Beware, also, that e.g. Scotland is often called a country by those in the British Isles - but the UK is also a country, yet Scotland is part of the UK. So 'country' is a bit difficult to pin down there as well.
Re: UK-related nomenclature
Date: Friday, 16 July 2004 18:49 (UTC)no subject
Date: Friday, 16 July 2004 06:14 (UTC)I can also think of "Anschrift".
Anschrift
Date: Friday, 16 July 2004 06:23 (UTC)I suppose it's part of my passive vocabulary but not part of my active vocabulary—like a number of Germanic synonyms for Greco-Latin words such as "Fernsprecher" for "Telefon" or "Lichtbild" for "Foto(grafie)", which I understand but don't use.
no subject
Date: Friday, 16 July 2004 07:07 (UTC)lay lay lain
;)
It does seem strange since we're so used to hearing it wrong that the wrong sounds right (and same with the "so [adjective] that..." where you aren't supposed to leave it at "so [adjective]" or something).
I got creer and crear mixed up on a request that I answered in Spanish once! I was supposed to be saying create but said cree for believe instead.
He lied on the bed
Date: Friday, 16 July 2004 08:43 (UTC)lay lay lain
Er, I hope you weren't serious with that, because that's not what I consider correct.
Re: He lied on the bed
Date: Friday, 16 July 2004 09:51 (UTC)present/infinitive, past, past particle
lie, lay, lain
lay, laid, laid
Today I lie on the bed, yesterday I lay on the bed, some other time I had lain on the bed; today I lay the book on the table, yesterday I (had) laid the book on the table.
Sorry for the confusion. O.o