News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Why God Hates German Words by ubernostrum on Sunday July 31, 2011 @02:09AM (#2827756)
It's about register: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)

A lot of comedy comes from using the "wrong" register for a given situation, and a lot of amusement for English speakers learning German comes from the fact that Germanic languages gave us our informal-register vocabulary (our formal vocabulary came from Greek and Latin by way of French).

(thus, for example, a science student giggles a bit at the seemingly-informal "Wasserstoff", sounding as it does like "water stuff", but doesn't bat an eye at "hydrogen", even though the Greek root words mean essentially the same thing)

There are no comments on this comment yet.