(no subject)

[pne]

Met 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.)

Comments

[sparkofcreation.livejournal.com]

Hmm. It's the same in English--Latinate words sounds really pretentious, Germanic ones don't. That leads to a lot of pairs in American law: "null [L] and void [G]"; "last will [G] and testament [L]." In Spanish they're "nulo" and "testamento" respectively ... sounds really dumb to say something is "nulo y nulo."

Also, it makes people sound smarter than they are when we interpret (we get accused of doing it on purpose sometimes). I know someone who was interpreting someone who said "Me vería en una situación muy precaria" and the interpreter said "I would find myself in a very precarious situation" and the judge said "Madame Interpreter, I find it hard to believe that *this* witness used the word 'precarious'!"

People don't usually say "conjunctivitis" in English ... I know it because I used to do medical interpreting, and also because in Spanish the ONLY word for it is conjuntivitis. The common English term is "pinkeye," at least in the US.

*note to self: post on linguaphiles about this* (unless you'd like to)

pinkeye

[pne.livejournal.com]

Weird -- I haven't come across the word "pinkeye" at all.

(On the other hand, I haven't talked about conjunctivitis an awful lot, either, so it's probably book knowledge, which tends to use a different register.)

*note to self: post on linguaphiles about this* (unless you'd like to)

About what -- the Germanic/Latinate and pretentious thing? Go ahead.

And thanks for the interesting comment!