Inherently funny words

[pne]

Some words in Germanic languages seem inherently funny to me as a speaker of German, because I imagine them translated morpheme-for-morpheme into their German cognates, and the result seems funny since it's not how you express it in German, even if you can understand it.

Specifically, I get that reaction with Dutch hoeveelheid "quantity" ("Wievielheit"? "how-much-ness"?) and Scandinavian hastighet "speed" ("Hastigkeit"? "hastiness"?).

Of course, the normal German word for "speed", Geschwindigkeit, sounds equally funny if you think about it for too long, perhaps because geschwind is not normally used in informal speech, so you have a contrast between the formal or poetic geschwind and the completely "normal" Geschwindigkeit.

Comments

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

I've had those reactions too, expect I didn't know "hastighet". I imagine the theoretically corresponding German word would have to be "Hastigkeit". I'm not sure but I think adjectives ending in "-ig" always take "keit" rather than "heit" when they become a noun.

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

The literal meaning of "quantity" is actually "how-much-ness".

[pne.livejournal.com]

Is that so? I didn't know that.

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's from Latin "quantus" meaning "how much". Perhaps you know Italian "quanto" or Spanish "cuánto".

[pne.livejournal.com]

What is "quality", then? "How-ness"?

[tungol.livejournal.com]

My Latin textbook gives qualis as "what sort of", so I guess quality is "what.sort-ness".

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

It's from "qualis" meaning "wie beschaffen", "was für ein?", so I think roughly Esperanto "kia". My dictionary says the word "qualitas" was formed by Cicero in analogy to a Greek word. I can't read the Greek letters there, but this website (http://davidlavery.net/barfield/Encyclopedia_Barfieldiana/Ideas_Concepts/Etymology.html) says the Greek word Cicero based his creation on is "poiotes" meaning "whatness".