Interesting Words (moved from Games)

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Etaoin Shrdlu

Guest

Bevölkerung in German, but neither strikes me as particularly notable. Perhaps the Dutch version would look odder to me if I had come upon it first, instead of seeing at an attempt at German that went slightly astray, which is my problem with the language.

'Mawkish' comes from 'mawk', an old word meaning 'maggot'.
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
"The ground floor" in Dutch is "de begane grond". That's literally "the walked/gone-on ground", or even, if you will, "the begone ground". Unfortunately the latter doesn't sound like it should, due to the usual meaning of English "begone" from the verb "be" + "gone". But a "begone ground" in the Dutch sense is a ground that one begoes.

 
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Etaoin Shrdlu

Guest

I'm pretty sure I've only come across 'parterre', probably in the Netherlands, but the internet tells me that 'de begane grond' is common in Belgium. At first glance it looks like a case of 'we're not Walloons, we've got a Flemish term'.
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
Walloons (at least around here) don't call it "parterre" though. We call it "rez-de-chaussée".
 

Iáson

Cívis Illústris

  • Civis Illustris

jujube < Lat. zizyphum < Gr. ζίζυφον
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
Ah! Google gave me another translation but maybe they're just synonyms.
 
 

Tironis

Civis Illustris

  • Civis Illustris

Location:
Anglia
Ah! Google gave me another translation but maybe they're just synonyms.
Haven't checked Google, but Ziegelstein is a synonym - there may be others.
 
 

Tironis

Civis Illustris

  • Civis Illustris

Location:
Anglia
Langenscheidt Dictionary:
Synonyms for "Ziegelstein"
 
 

Tironis

Civis Illustris

  • Civis Illustris

Location:
Anglia
Does anyone anywhere call it parterre? Is this a 'we're not French, we're Walloons' thing?
. . . In einer Parterre-Wohnung ist man die erste Anlaufstelle für den Paket-Boten . . .

Erdgeschoss or Parterre.
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
Does anyone anywhere call it parterre?
Not that I know of. But you never know. For it to mean the ground floor in Dutch, perhaps it was used that way in French at some point, and possibly still is in some dialect or other. Though it's also possible that a semantic shift happened within Ducth itself, post-borrowing.
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
The Dutch for "triangle" is "driehoek". That is absolutely lovely. Yes, I know there's nothing really surprising about it, but I just love it when foreign words are translated like this into a language instead of being borrowed (almost) unchanged as has been done so much in English.
 
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