3 Commando Brigade

German vs Other Languages

I'll just leave these here...

I know it's for comical effect, but it is wrong on a lot of levels.

PS: Yeah that's something very german to point out.

Are you saying it may not be a strictly accurate document?

Knock Knock,

Who's there?

Use the peephole it's more efficient.

My favourite German joke.

Well here is a very quick (and very german) summary of what is "wrong".

The first thing is that the guy in the video is wearing clothes which "should" be associated with southern Germany and to be more precise with Bavaria. Bavaria is only one part of Germany and their so called culture, clothing and food (as shown in the video) is pretty much alien to most people in Germany. Bavaria is just a state in Germany they like to call it the "free state of Bavaria" (Freistaat Bayern). This sums up their general attitude and social behavior which goes from village idiots/rednecks, to arrogant
bigwigs in Munich.

Also here is my personal overview of german states.


On the aspect of language. German by the way does not have more specific words like English or French for example. German has just a different spelling because compound words have no space in german. For example

English: Sexual Intercourse (short form Sex).
German: Geschlechtsverkehr. Geschlecht means gender and verkehrt traffic or intercourse. So there is no real difference exept that compound words usually have no space. Geschlechtsverkehr is also a colloquial term for it. A more academic term would be Sexualverkehr.


The pronunciation is something you could call "pop-cultural" stereotyping. It appears that the only "German" some people hard were from speeches of Hitler. The first thing is that Hitler was Austrian and not German and that he did not speak like that in private. Hitler was extremely conscious about his image and there is only one confirmed audio document where you hear his normal voice. So compare this:


To this:


The origin of the word SCHMETTERLING is pretty complex. Butterfly's or SCHMETTERLINGE are also known as "Falter" in German. Falter is related to the verb "falten" which means folding in English. SCHMETTERLINGE are obviously folding their wings. But how do we get from Falter to SCHMETTER? SCHMETTER was a term for milk in the 16th Century in German and people were a bit more (not that much) superstitious. People thought that SCHMETTERLINGE were witches that decided to transform into one to steal milk and (here it comes) Butter. Thats's why they were also called Buttervogel (Butterbird) and that sounds pretty close to "Butterfly" doesn't it?

So probably you brits stole our words again.

Well that didn't take long to get around to the Nazis and Hitler, and, rather unexpectedly, it was a German who raised the subject.

Kind of but it all goes deeper (cue inception music).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages

Mefirst - why do you live in a city called Food?

Because the town had a lot of different names. There is no theory that is 100% yet, but the most plausible one is this:

The current name comes from the time when the town was centered around a female Monastery which first had the name Astnide and was later renamed into the Latin word Assindia, We don't really know why they changed it to this but they maybe just wanted to make it sound more Latin to make some bishops happy and its not too far from Astnide to Assindia. Assindia means "Essen" in German.