this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2025
552 points (96.9% liked)

Comic Strips

13410 readers
2682 users here now

Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.

The rules are simple:

Web of links

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Let's see some of them are their own words in our language. Blueprint is similar with it being combined from 2 words. Firework (fire thrower) and homesick (home sad) and newspaper (time write) are in the same boat. Pothole and workplace are 2 word phrases however. Road hole and working place.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm sure you can find a lot of parallels in Europe since English shares a lot with Germanic and Latin languages but what I mean is any language could easily have a single dedicated word for it and these would relatively sound funny.

for example you could imagine a language having "extinguisher" as a job title, which makes sense, but then you'd say "in English they call extinguishers 'people who fight fire' like they're fucking boxing isn't that funny"

but also I don't know maybe it's because I'm fascinated by language I don't actually think it's funny. I think sick people house makes a lot of sense. much more than hospital to be honest, which means guest house, which is more appropriate for a hotel, which shares etymology with hospital!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I guess you can but I am slavic so not really many paralels there. But yeah the german compound words make a lot of sense.