Category: English

Hyppytyynytyydytys

By Simon

Pomppulinna / bouncy castle

I discovered a very useful word in Finnish today – hyppytyynytyydytys – which apparently means “bouncy cushion satisfaction”.

You can hear it pronounced on Forvo.

It breaks down as follows:

hyppy = to jump, leap, hop, bounce
tyyny = pillow, cushion, oad, bolster
tyydytys = satisfaction, gratification

I suspect it was made up for fun.

Bouncy (elastic, springy) in Finnish is kimmoisa, and a bouncy castle is a pomppulinna, which appears to be a brand name.

So if you were satisfied with your bouncy castle, could you say you have “pomppulinnatyydytys”?

What if you were dissatisfied with your bouncy cushion or castle?

Bouncy castles are also known as inflatable castles or jumping castles. The first such inflatable structures were made in the USA and known as “space walks”. What do you call them?

Sources: The Language Closet, GoogleTranslate, bab.la, Wikipedia

Fair friends

By Simon

Bra vänner är som stjärnor. Du ser dem inte alltid, men du vet att de alltid finns där.

I learnt two words for friend in Swedish this week – vän [vɛːn] and kompis [kɔmpɪs]. The former is translated as “buddy” in my Swedish lessons, and the latter as “friend”.

Vän can mean friend, comrade, lover, mate, pal, sympathizer, well-wisher or acquaintance, and is also an old word for fair or beautiful. It comes from the Old Norse vinr (friend), from the Proto-Germanic *winiz (friend, loved one), from the Proto-Indo-European *wenh₁- (to seek, desire, love, win).

The element -win in names such as Darwin, Edwin, Godwin, Irwin, etc comes from the same root, as does the name Venus (via Latin).

Kompis cane be translated as brother, buddy, friend, chum, comrade, crony, mate, mucker, and is a contraction of kompanjon (partner, associate) +‎ -is.

Vän appears in expressions such as:

– flickvän = girlfriend
– pojkvän = boyfriend
– hjärtevän = beloved, close friend, sweetheart
– ovän = enemy
– väninna = female friend (of a female)
– vänlig = friendly, kind, gentle, amicable, affable
– vänling = kind, nice, sweet
– vänskap = friendship
– vänskaplig = friendly, amicable
– väntjänst = a service done out of friendship
– vänkrets = circle of friends
– vänort = sister town, twin town

Other Swedish words for friend or acquaintance include:

– kamrat = friend, associate, chum, comrade, fellow, mate, partner, fellow
– bekant = friend, acquaintance
– polare = brother, buddy, mate, dawg, mucker, crony, pally
– fränder = kinsman

Which of these are most commonly used?

The words on the image mean “Good friends are like stars. You do not always see them, but you know they are always there.” This is one of the things that pops up when you search for “vänner” (friends), e.g. on this site.

Sources: Wiktionary, bab.la

Treading Together

By Simon

Treading Together

In Swedish one word for a meeting is ett sammenträde. I wondered about the origins of this word, so thought I would investigate.

Sammenträde comes from sammanträda (to meet, to hold a meeting, to convene), which comes from sammen (together) and träda (to tread, walk, step). So when you have a meeting in Swedish, you are “treading together”.

Sammenträde also means session, conclave or assembly. Related expressions include:

– sammanträda igen = to reconvene
– sammanträde som försiggår i plenum – plenary session
– regeringssammanträde – cabinet meeting

Other Swedish words for meeting include:

– möte = meeting, assembly, conference, convocation, encounter, engagement, rally, meet
– konferens = meeting, conference, consultation, school meeting
– samling = array, gathering, meeting, accumulation, aggregate, assembling, assembly, battery, body, bunch, circus, cluster, coalition, collection, crowd, cumulation, garner, huddle, lot, meet, pack, corpus
– sammenkomst = assembly, gathering, gettogether, meeting, conference, session (“arrive together”)
– församling = assembly, parish, cure, flock, township, meeting, congregation, diet

Are there interesting words for meeting in other languages?

Sources: Wiktionary, bab.la

Filling Up Your Years

By Simon

Hourglass image

One way to say that you have a birthday in Swedish is to use the verb fylla (to fill up, load, pack). For example:

– Jag fyller i april = My birthday is in April*
– Du fyller år i morgen = Tomorrow is your birthday
– Han fyller nämligen år i dag = It’s his birthday today
– Hon fyllde 40 år i går = She was 40 years old yesterday

Birthday in Swedish is födelsedag [ˈføːdɛlsɛˌdɑːɡ /ˈfœlsɛˌdɑː(ɡ)], and Happy Birthday is Grattis på födelsedagen. Födelsedag comes from födelse (birth) and dag (day). Födelse comes from föda (to feed, give birth), which is related to the English words food and feed; and -else (a suffix that makes verbs into nouns).

*Could you also say Min födelsedag är i april (My birthday is in April)?

When asking how old someone is in Swedish, could you ask many years they’ve filled?

Is it polite to ask someone’s age in Sweden?

Are there interesting ways to refer to birthdays in other languages?

Sources: bab.la, Wiktionary

Cake on Cake and Gilded Lilies

By Simon

A gilded lily

When you have to much of a good thing, or are repeating things superfluously, you’re putting cake on cake – tårta på tårta or kaka på kaka, at least in Swedish [source].

For example:

– Det är tårta på tårta = That would be too much [source]
– Det är lite tårta på tårta att tala om ”ISBN-nummer” = It is a bit superfluous to talk about “ISBN number”

The English phrase “too much of a good thing” first appeared in writing in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It in 1600 [source].

A similar idiom is “to gild the lily“, meaning to embellish or improve something unnecessarily. Or to add superfluous attributes to something. It is apparently a misquote from Shakespeare’s play King John (1595):

“To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw a perfume on the violet, to smooth the ice, or add another hue unto the rainbow, or with taper-light to seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, is wasteful and ridiculous excess.”

Other related idioms include “to go overboard” and “to over-egg the pudding” [source].

In Chinese an equivalent idiom is 畫蛇添足 [画蛇添足] (huàshétiānzú) = “to draw a snake and add legs” [source].

Are there other idioms in English or other languages with a similar meaning?

Photo from: http://www.janneyscollection.com/product/arthur-court-gilded-lily-side-table/

Catfish and Sockpuppets

By Simon

Photo of a catfish

A catfish is “any of an order (Siluriformes) of chiefly freshwater stout-bodied scaleless bony fishes having long tactile barbels” or “a person who sets up a false personal profile on a social networking site for fraudulent or deceptive purposes” [source].

According to Wikipedia, a catfish is “someone pretending to be someone they are not on the internet”. The term apparently became popular after the 2010 film Catfish, the story of a man who falls in love with a girl online who is using a false identity. However it was used for decades before then.

I only discovered the second meaning today when reading something a friend posted online. He talked about being catfished on a date, and I had to look up the term.

A few years ago I was catfished myself by someone on a dating website who claimed to be a Russian girl living in France, but turned out to be an online scammer looking for money. I didn’t send them any money, and got to practise my French for a few months, so it wasn’t an entirely negative experience.

A similar term is sockpuppet, which is “an online identity used for purposes of deception”, and was originally “a false identity assumed by a member of an Internet community who spoke to, or about, themselves while pretending to be another person”. It was first used in 1993, and can now refer to someone who praises, defends or supports a person or organization, manipulates public opinion, or circumvents a suspension or ban from a website [source].

Photo from Flickr

Aarhus

By Simon

I had a great time in Aarhus. I arrived on Friday afternoon, and am currently on a train on my way to Copenhagen. I’ll be flying back to Manchester this evening, and should arrive back in Bangor late tonight.

In Aarhus I stayed with a Czech friend who teaches linguistics at the local university. She introduced me to some of her colleagues and friends, and showed me round the city. We also went for walks in the woods, round a nearby lake – Årslev Engsø – and to the beach.

Aarhus is quieter and smaller than Copenhagen – easy to explore on foot, and it seems like a friendly place, and its nickname is the ‘City of Smiles’.

I spoke a bit of Danish, though found it difficult to understand what people said to me in Danish. I also spoke some Welsh and a fair bit of English – all the locals I talked to speak English well, and they didn’t all switch to English when they heard my less than perfect attempts to speak Danish.

Here are some photos:

https://flic.kr/s/aHsmdEppBj

Can you learn a language just with Duolingo?

By Simon

A screen shot of my Duolingo Romanian course

For the past year I’ve been learning Romanian with Duolingo. I wanted to see if I could learn a language entirely with that course, and chose Romanian because it was the only major Romance language I haven’t studied, and I have some Romanian-speaking friends.

Although I can understand Romanian to some extent now, especially when it’s written, I can’t speak it very well as I haven’t used it with real people much yet.

Compared with the other Romance languages, the grammar of Romanian is more complex, with four noun cases, like Latin. If you just use the Duolingo app, you have to try to work out the grammar for yourself, which isn’t easy. The online version includes some notes on grammar, but I’ve been mainly using the app. So my knowledge of the grammar is somewhat limited.

I do have a Colloquial Romanian course, which should help me to learn the language more thoroughly, but I’ll probably have a break before learning more.

I’ve also been learning Swedish and Russian on Duolingo for just over a year, and started learning Danish a few months ago. I had dabbled with Swedish a bit before, mainly with Babbel, and have studied Russian on and off for quite a while using various courses.

I can have conversations in Swedish, and Russian, though still have quite a way to go before I consider myself fluent in either language. I can read and understand quite a bit of Danish, though can’t say a lot yet. I find Swedish and Danish relatively easy as they have quite a lot in common with English, German and each other, and relatively simple grammar. Russian is more of a challenge – the grammar is more complex and there are a lot of unfamiliar words to learn.

For the past few months I’ve also been using Memrise to learn Swedish, Danish and Russian. In some ways I prefer it to Duolingo as Memrise focuses more of phrases you’re likely to use in everyday life, and the recordings are made by real people rather than robots.

I do like some of the ridiculous phrases that pop up on Duolingo though, such as:

– Sköldpaddan har en gul hatt = The turtle has a yellow hat
– Han går som en älg = He walks like a moose
– Jag hör inte dig eftersom jag har kanelbullar i öronen = I don’t hear you because I have cinnamon rolls in my ears
– Skildpadden drikker te = The turtle is drinking tea
– Anden læser avisen = The duck is reading the newspaper
– Ca caută ursul în șifonier? What is the bear doing in the wardrobe?
– Am un cuptor plin cu pui = I have an oven filled with chickens
– Eu am văzut o bufniță răzând = I saw an owl laughing
– Моя лошадь не художник а архитектор = My horse is not an artist but an architect
– Этот человек говорит, что он волшебник, но я ему не верю = This person says he’s a wizard, but I don’t believe him
– У меня есть говорящая лошадь = I have a talking horse

So, is it possible to learn a language just with Duolingo?

You can learn a lot, but it’s unlikely you’ll be speaking the language well by the end of the course. For me it works best for languages related to ones I know with grammar you can pick up as you go along (Swedish & Danish), and not quite so well for more distant and grammatically complex languages (Russian & Romanian).

I am now on a 328 day streak on Duolingo, and before that I was on a 96 day streak, but didn’t get enough points one day last summer to maintain it. So that’s 14 months of studying every day. When I’ve studied languages before, I would sometimes miss a few days, or even weeks. Now I don’t want to miss a single day.

Have you learnt any languages entirely or mainly with Duolingo?

Exploring Copenhagen / Udforskning af København

By Simon

Today I am in Copenhagen on the way to see a friend in Aarhus. I left Bangor at way-too-early o’clock this morning, and arrived in Copenhagen early this afternoon. I’m staying in an AirBnB in Sydhavn, not far from the centre of the city. One of my hosts is from Moldova, and the other is a Dane, who I haven’t met yet. I spoke a bit of Russian and Romanian with my Moldovan host, which she seemed pleased to hear.

This afternoon I explored the touristy part of Copenhagen, and saw some nice parks, a castle, lots of boats, including a tall ship, a little mermaid, and some interesting buildings. I heard quite a few different languages being spoken, including Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese and other flavours of Chinese, English, French and even a bit of Danish. My knowledge of Danish is limited – I can read Danish quite well, and speak and understand it a little.

Cycling seems to be a popular way to get around here, perhaps because Copenhagen is so flat. There are plenty of cycle paths, and even traffic lights for cyclists. There are also many cargo bikes – three-wheeled contraptions with a large container on the front for shopping, children, pets or other things. Some cyclists indicate they’re stopping by raising their arm, as if asking a question, which is practical, but looks quite funny to me.

Here are a few photos:

Copenhagen / København

Tomorrow I’m off to Aarhus to see a Czech friend who teaches Linguistics at the university there. We usually speak a mixture of Czech, English and Welsh, and now we can add some Danish to the mix.

Later addition – I’ve met both my hosts now – the guy is actually from the Faroe Islands, and we’ve just had a very interesting conversation about Faroese and other languages. He told me that they used to borrow a lot of words into Faroese, especially from Danish, but now tend to create new words from Faroese roots. He finds it hard to understand some of the new words, as he’s not used to using them. They speak English to each other, by the way, as he doesn’t speak Russian or Romanian, and she speaks only a little Danish, and no Faroese.

Zhoozhing up

By Simon

The word zhoozh [ʒʊʃ/ʒʊʒ] was one of the words of the week on the episode of the Talk The Talk podcast I listened to yesterday.

There are various ways to write it: zhoozh, zhoosh, zhuzh, or even tszuj. It means “To tweak, finesse or improve (something); to make more appealing or exciting”, and is often used with up, e.g. to zhoozh up.

Zhoozh was possibly first used in the 1970s in Polari, a cant or slang used by Romani people, and also gay people, in the UK, especially in theatres.

It may come from the Angloromani yuser (to clean) and yusher (to clear), from yus-, yuz-, yuzh- (clean) and yush- (clear), from the Romani žuž-, už- (clean”).

It is also used to mean to blend ingredients using a food mixer or blender. For example, throw the ingredients in the blender and give them a quick zhoozh.

In South African slang it means stylish, hot, or cool.

Source: Wiktionary

See also:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/zhuzh-zhoosh-queer-eye-origin-kressley
http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2009/03/placeholder.html
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=zhoozh

Are there any similar words in other languages?