Everyone’s like “those Germans have a word for everything” but English has a word for tricking someone into watching the music video for Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up.
This is either going to be the most wonderfully educational post I’ve seen all night, or else this is five (5) links to the music video for Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up.
I was just thinking about how some people in fandom love to police the way authors represent bilingual characters. And one of the biggest arguments I’ve seen is “I hate when they switch languages randomly in sentences” and “I hate when they just start speaking in another language and say, haha oops sorry I was talking to my mom”
Because like… I was just sitting and talking to my gf in english. They were simultaneously messaging their brother in english. They were playing world of warcraft, which is in english. Then we were quiet for five seconds, they had one thought in danish, and just started talking to me in danish, when they know I don’t speak danish.
If my friend Bolla is talking to her mom or sister when she messages me, she’ll message me in danish without thinking about it.
When Sora and Theo get startled or mad playing video games on a call with me, they abruptly switch into danish without thinking about it.
They’ll forget words in english ((the same way english speakers forget english words)), but remember it in danish, and have to switch into danish for another one of them to translate for me.
I’m not bilingual, but the bilingual experience seems wild and sporadic to me, and not nearly as cut and dry as a lot of fandom police try to make it. Also, like everything else, the bilingual experience is different and unique to everyone, so like… chill. People are just trying to give representation. Meet them with guidance rather than hate.
Yeah all of this.
I’m no longer functionally bilingual but I was until I was about 7, and I know I don’t think like straight English speakers.
My brain is usually a cocophany of different sounds. Little flits of language where a word is half one language, half another, and linked to a picture.
I tell people I think in pictures but I kind of don’t. I think in tactile sounds and sometimes it comes out my mouth in one big garbled mess.
My phone is set to Dutch, but I live in the UK. I’ll Google for stuff and click on the first Wikipedia link I see, and I literally won’t realise it’s in Dutch for a while, sometimes not after copying/pasting a passage to someone who doesn’t speak Dutch.
One time I was reading a book and found a hilarious paragraph. I read it aloud to the person I was dating at the time, who waited politely for me to be done before informing me that it wasn’t in English.
I love discovering etymological links between languages, like today I was talking to someone about how a circumflex in French indicates a lost s after the vowel and they were like “so même used to be mesme then?” And I was like “WAAAAH THAT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE BECAUSE IT’S MISMO IN SPANISH THIS IS SO EXCITING” and this is probably why I don’t have friends
i know I’m not the first person on tumblr to talk about this but how about this for etymological tea
gu- in french is cognate with english w- like guerre/war (or middle english warre)
ê denotes a lost es like in bête/beast (old french beste)
so
guêpe is related to its english equivalent wasp
i’m not done bitch okay let’s take a trip east
chleb is polish for bread and it’s cognate with
russian and belarusian хлеб, czech chleba and lots of more slavic stuff
here’s the cool bit it was borrowed in the proto-slavic period from the gothic 𐌷𐌻𐌰𐌹𐍆𐍃 as *xlěbъ
so it’s actually cognate with the word for bread in the extinct gothic language and with everything else that comes from proto-germanic *hlaibaz including but not limited to english loaf, german Laib, swedish and danish lev, norwegian leiv,
AND
through more borrowing, finnish and estonian leipä and leib, and samic languages such as northern sámi láibi, southern sámi laejpie and a whole lot more
I love the theory that most of the words Shakespeare is credited with “inventing” are really just pre-existing slang that was popular among teenage girls at the time the plays were written, because it puts a totally different complexion on how the tone of certain scenes must have read to contemporary audiences.
Some angry shakesphere character upon seeing the man who murdered his dad and fucked his wife: BEGONE THOT
Shakespeare would totally write “BEGONE THOT!” But then he would write a
fire monologue where the whole thing turns on how thot and thought are
pronounced the same.
The “thoughts on thots” speech.
And then there’s the “All that Glisters/Glitters is Not Gold” bit, where he’s credited for something that is explicitly framed as already being a well-worn saying in the play it appears in. Still not sure how the fuck that happened.
so my friend is studying abroad in germany this semester
My mom is German and told me what the fuck these were actually trying to mean.
“You can me once” is supposed to mean “you can kiss my ass ONCE ” As in like,, you can be a suck up once.
“What must, THAT MUST” is supposed to be “it is what it is”
“Now butter by the fishes is a German saying that is more like ” can I have some butter with the fish?“ Which basically means ” get to he point of the story. “
These are somehow just as confusing as the coasters
I don’t wanna shit on someone’s mother, but the actual correct explanations should make more sense.
“You Can Me Once”: “Du kannst mich mal (am Arsch lecken).” This is the equivalent to “kiss my ass”. “Mal” which was googled into ‘once’ here is just a filler word used to complete the half-sentence, it does not actually mean anything. Just like “kiss my ass” is ironically not about asskissing but about telling someone to fuck off, fuck you, so is “Du kannst mich mal.”
“What must that must”: “Was muss das muss”. Not completely wrong up there, but more precisely, it’s “you gotta do what you gotta do”. Often muttered as a politely vague reply to someone you randomly meet asking “how’s life” when life’s shit or you’re running an unpleasant errant/on a doctor’s visit etc.
“Now butter by the fishes”: “Butter bei die Fische” (which btw is not standard German grammar but that’s exactly how we say it, I’m honestly not sure why… may have its root in a dialect or other Germanic language). Correct translation here, it means to get to the point, get real for a second. Explanation? By the time you plop a piece of butter on a grilled or baked fish, it’s ready to eat, aka you ‘got to the point of the meal’.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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