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Friday, 17 January 2003 09:17![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pneMet the missionaries this morning on the bus. They were going to Stade for a Tausch [lovely missionary Denglisch :)].
I asked Elder Su'a how long he had left and he said only two more weeks. And he also said it's now 24 °C in Kansas City, MO where he comes from -- wow!
And on the topic of Denglisch -- this week I went to the doctor because of a painful area on my eye. He said that it was a "Bindehautentzündung" and when I heard that word my first association was the English translation "conjunctivitis". Then he said that the medical term was "Konju---" and I joined in saying "Konjunktivitis". He seemed a bit surprised that I knew the term and asked me whether I had heard it before. I said no but that the English word was "conjunctivitis" so it wasn't that hard to guess what word he was talking about :D
I've seen that before -- Latinate words which sound really pretentious in German are often fairly common words in English. So a Germanophone trying to impress me by using a Latinate word often fails if I know the English cognate and it's a simple word there.
(Which also reminds me of when I was on my mission and I sometimes explained an English word to French or Italian missionaries by giving a Romance-derived synonym; Americans asked me how translating an easy word such as "cliff" with a hard word such as "precipice" would help them, but of course it's the cognacy(?) that does it. Similarly, an Italian elder said that it took him a while to understand what a "shot" is that you get at a doctor's, while "injection" would have been perfectly clear to him.)
I asked Elder Su'a how long he had left and he said only two more weeks. And he also said it's now 24 °C in Kansas City, MO where he comes from -- wow!
And on the topic of Denglisch -- this week I went to the doctor because of a painful area on my eye. He said that it was a "Bindehautentzündung" and when I heard that word my first association was the English translation "conjunctivitis". Then he said that the medical term was "Konju---" and I joined in saying "Konjunktivitis". He seemed a bit surprised that I knew the term and asked me whether I had heard it before. I said no but that the English word was "conjunctivitis" so it wasn't that hard to guess what word he was talking about :D
I've seen that before -- Latinate words which sound really pretentious in German are often fairly common words in English. So a Germanophone trying to impress me by using a Latinate word often fails if I know the English cognate and it's a simple word there.
(Which also reminds me of when I was on my mission and I sometimes explained an English word to French or Italian missionaries by giving a Romance-derived synonym; Americans asked me how translating an easy word such as "cliff" with a hard word such as "precipice" would help them, but of course it's the cognacy(?) that does it. Similarly, an Italian elder said that it took him a while to understand what a "shot" is that you get at a doctor's, while "injection" would have been perfectly clear to him.)