SomethingAwful is a (generally not work-safe) comedy site that usually gets me laughing with every visit. Perhaps they’re most famous for “Photoshop Phridays“, but they have a variety of columnists and recurring features that are worth checking out for a quick laugh.
However, a recent edition of “Comedy Goldmine” is simply too magnificent not to feature here. The theme? Foreign Language Screw-Ups.
Although they’re all pretty funny, it seems like most of them can be broken down into a few different categories of speech error.
False Cognates
A foreign language word is considered to be a “cognate” if it’s similar in both sound and meaning to a word in one’s native language, and they both descended from the same source, either from a mother language or through borrowing. For instance, in Spanish, the word for ‘computer’ (computadora) is a cognate, as is the word for ‘volunteer’ (voluntario). These cognates happen frequently when two languages borrow heavily from the same language. In this case, English and Spanish both have many words with Latin roots.
However, it’s not uncommon for foreign language students to accidentally use a “false cognate”. These are, as you might suspect, words that sound very similar in two languages, but have different meanings. The textbook Spanish example is assistir (’to attend’) and atender (’to assist’). Sometimes, the mistakes can be innocent, but sometimes…
Last year on a vacation to Cuba I rented a moped and managed to break it. When I returned it to the rental place I used my awesome high school Spanish to say I was ‘embarazado’ about what happened, meaning to say embarrassed. Turns out ‘embarazado’ means ‘pregnant’. I’m a guy.
Note, it’s not just English speakers who can make this mistake:
This brother and sister I knew grew up in Mexico and were eating at a restaurant in the States. Well, the brother kept on bothering the sister, so she finally yelled, “Stop molesting me!” The restaurant went dead silent and everybody stared.
This comes from the false Spanish cognate, molestar, which means (completely innocently) ‘to annoy’ or ‘to bother’.
False cognates can make for some wonderful communication issues, but they’re not the only source of interlingual hilarity.
Secondary Meanings
In many languages, it’s common for words to have several meanings. Just like the English “cock” can either denote a male chicken or the male sexual organ, languages are littered with minefields of multiple meanings.
When a non-native speaker looks up a word in the dictionary, especially a small dictionary, it’s not uncommon to see several options listed. So, if a Spanish speaker wanted to tell a woman “You have a pretty cat” and looked the word up in a dictionary, there’s a decent chance that, quite innocently, he’ll use the word “pussy” instead and he’ll end up complimenting her genitalia. Here’s one wonderful example of a hilarious alternate meaning:
The only thing I can think of was when I was in my German class and we’d been having a heatwave. I said “Ich bin heiss” (meaning “I am hot”), which made my teacher laugh.
Apparently, saying “Ich bin heiss” is one way of saying “I’m horny” in German.
This can also work the other way around. Sometimes, a language will have a word with two meanings, and in the other language, each meaning has a distinctive word.
When I was in London with my class (German students), something hilarious happened at the airport. We where standing in a queue and some Brits came around and started to cut in line. A friend of mine yelled: “You can’t come here! There’s a snake here!”, which not only baffled the British couple, but made everyone else, including our teacher, laugh out loud.
The German word “Schlange” is used both for snake and queue, and he used the direct translation.
Grammatical Errors
Sometimes, you can have all the words right, but a little tiny grammatical error will get you.
Fhqwhgads writes…
Back in High School, while on a class trip to Italy, one of the guys was hitting on a local chick. He was doing well, until he used the word “bello” (instead of “bella”). She slapped him and walked away. Never call an Italian girl handsome.
Here, the writer failed to take into consideration the fact that in Italian (as well as in many other languages), adjectives are marked for gender. In English, we have separate words (a girl is “pretty” and a guy is “handsome”), but in Italian, that little tiny morpheme (unit of meaning) is able to completely derail even the most persuasive of pick-ups. The gender distinction can also change the meaning of words…
Mortanis writes…
Back in high school French, we had to pair off and interview your partner, then relate their day back to the class in French. A friend of mine interviewed a girl, and promptly reported to the class “She likes to play with her cat”.But used the feminine for cat, which is slang for pussy. Was pretty enjoyable to watch our fairly attractive French teacher start snickering over something like that.
Misleading Mispronunciations
Nearly any foreign language one studies will have some sounds that are different from those in your native language. As a phonetics student, this brings me great joy, but when speaking another language, these differences can lead to some wonderful errors:
“Cook” in Dutch is “kok” which is pronounced “cock”. A friend of mine once tried to “thank the cock for the nice meal” at a restaurant.
A co-worker of my dad’s name is Dick de Cock, which is a perfectly normal name in the Netherlands. However, when he got a promotion and suddenly had to travel all over the world, he got a lot of weird looks.
Here, I suspect that the Aspirated/Unaspirated distinction might be causing problems:
Walking around crowded night markets in Taiwan after getting a taste of my first giant chicken schnitzel I asked my girlfriend how to say chicken schnitzel in Mandarin which she told me was “gi pai”
Much to her amusement when I misheard her, thinking she said it “gi bai” i loudly proclaimed in Mandarin to all around that I loved “gi bai”
Which I found out shortly sort of means I love vagina.
All it takes is a simple change in the voicing of a consonant to go from loving sausage to loving the polar opposite. Scary, huh?
Conclusion
There’s no shortage of ways to mess up in a foreign language. Between treacherous false-cognates, deceitful second meanings, grammatical gaffes and malicious mispronunciations, sometimes a second of speech may seem like an ocean of opportunity for offensive communication.
However, the beauty of it all is that generally, people laugh when such speech errors are made. If somebody knows you’re a foreigner, you often get the benefit of the doubt.
The moral of this story: Next time you’d like to compliment a girl’s pussy, you’d better have an accent, or else you’re going to be very, very pregnant.
Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Language Humor, Language Usage, Sociolinguistics, Speech and Grammar Errors, Words, Phrases, and Idioms |
Comments
Leave a Comment
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
Site Information
Search all posts
Tags
- Computers and Software (12)
- Conventional Linguistics (94)
- Computational Linguistics (4)
- Dialects and Idiolects (6)
- Etymology (2)
- Language Acquisition (4)
- Language Change (8)
- Linguistic Anthropology (4)
- Phonetic Phriends (3)
- Phonetics and Phonology (20)
- Psycholinguistics (4)
- Sociolinguistics (22)
- Translation and Translation Theory (10)
- Words, Phrases, and Idioms (27)
- Language and Thought (10)
- Language Censorship (3)
- Language Creation (6)
- Language Humor (25)
- Language Usage (75)
- Linguistic Mysticism (10)
- Notes (44)
Language Sites and Blogs
Linguistics and Language Resources
Links for Corrections
Unrelated-yet-awesome
Archives
- March 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
Site features
- Entries RSS
- Comments RSS
- Powered by Wordpress
- Theme based on Vertigo Squared.
- Hosting by Joyent
Once in Rome I wanted to give up my seat on a bus to a lady who looked like she need to sit. So I should have said,
“Signora, prenda il mio posto.”
(Take my seat, ma’am)
But of course, I got the gender wrong and said,
“Signora, prenda la mia posta.”
(Take my mail, ma’am)
She was gracious enough, and thankful enough for the seat, not to point out my mistake. But I knew immediately I had said something odd.
The other thing, is that when I was learning the French /y/, I totally said “Merci beau cul” instead of “Merci beaucoup.”
Thank you, nice ass!
My story isn’t nearly as humorous, but it’s a good example of the the pitfalls of gender morphemes (not to mention the excellent service available in one particular restaurant in Salamanca):
On a study-abroad trip to Spain, one of the guys in my group (probably the best speaker of all of us) wanted some pepper with his paella, so he asked the waiter for pimiento. The waiter said it would take a few minutes, but that he would go get some. While Dave wondered why it would take time for the waiter to bring some ground black pepper, I already suspected what mistake he had made … but surely the waiter understood what Dave actually wanted, right? Well, the waiter eventually returned with a plate of beautifully sliced red bell pepper. My hunch was correct; Dave should’ve asked the waiter for pimienta, not pimiento.
Hi there! I love your site, only just discovered it.
I too have a love of all things linguistic, I have a BA (Hons) in Linguistics-graduated two years ago.
My favourite areas of study were:
Sociolinguistics
Language and Gender
Language in Everday Life
History of language and…
… Neurolinguistics.
I miss studying, and keep thinking I should have gone on to do an MA!
I love the title of your blog-I recognised the phonetic alphabet right away ;) Nice to see good old ’schwa’ in use!
Re: this post. When I was studying German in senior school (our equivalent of high school), I wanted to tell my class that I ‘went on long costal walks’. What I *actually* said was:
“I go on coastguard’s walking sticks” To this day I still laugh at that!
Jen
My understanding is that cognates are words that share a common ancestor. They don’t necessarily have the same sound or meaning.
Anyway, that was a very amusing post!
When I was a young man, I took a trip to Japan. Surprisingly, not many people there spoke English. That was fine with me, since I carried along an elementary knowledge of Japanese that I wanted to practice. I made mistakes right and left, but one of the extremes was when I was trying to explain to someone I met that I was an artist. Instead, he understood me to be a geisha girl. At first he looked at me in deep confusion, until the mistake became clear, and he couldn’t stop laughing.
In France, I mixed up the words baiser and baisser. Standing inside a well packed Paris metro, I was perturbed by the station names being high on the wall, so only seated passengers could see them. I turned to my friend and said “I can’t see a thing… they really should copulate with the signs”. Of course, what I meant was that they should lower them.
I just remembered another embarrassing mistake I made on behalf of my grandmother. When my brother was to marry his wife, a French woman, my grandmother asked me to translate a note she wished to write to the parents of the bride-to-be. Instead of conveying the special qualities that my grandmother found in the young woman, the wording I chose, (which I found out months later) had the nuance of casting this newest member of our family in a somewhat odd light, unique in a strange way, and not being quite normal. Nothing was ever mentioned of that note by the French family, but hopefully they would have recognized the intention beyond the actual words.
There are plenty more incidences. I always tend to travel with a foot in my mouth, and it’s certain that I’ve made far more faux-pas than I’m aware. Fortunately, most people seem to be good natured about linguistic mistakes.
[...] and linguistic mystic (love the title of the most recent post: i’m very pregnant that i’m late) [...]
There’s a video store near my office (in Mexico) called “Bloque Fantasma” -Ghost Block would be the translation-. I suppose they just mixed the meanings of Blockbuster and Ghostbuster when they tried to translate “Blockbuster” to Spanish. As if buster=ghost (fantasma) in “ghostbuster”.
Every time I look at the neon sign, I chuckle a little.
I have a nice anecdote, too. On our holiday in Greece my german-speaking mother and me used to drink an orange juice for breakfast. My mother tried to communicate in English, since we didn’t speak Greek. When the waitress came with our juices, she smiled at her and said: “I’m very afraid of this orange juice!”
She thought “afraid” would be the German “erfreut” and wanted to say: “I’m looking foreward to…” (Ich freue mich sehr auf…) I literally rolled on the floor laughing and the waitress just looked blank. It took me some time to explain the mistake. I’ll never forget that.
French and English are always having this problem. A French friend of mine was discussing how a particular soccer player lacked clairvoyance when he was playing. It means vision or being able to read the play in French but in English it means the supernatural power of seeing objects or actions removed in space or time from natural viewing….but you kinda roll with it and know what people mean in the end.