| Group soc.culture.nordic
article 866
From: [email protected] (Hans Huttel)
Subject: Re: pitch-accent
Organization: Laboratory for the Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh U
In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (Inge Wallin
writes:
>
>This reminds me about an ad I saw quiet some time ago. It was a foreign
>bakery that wanted to sell bread with the sentence:
>
>"Detta br�d bakas utav bara helvete."
>
>What they wanted to say was: "This bread is baked of whole wheat only",
>but what they really said was "This bread is baked like hell".
>
>The word `hel' in swedish means whole and `vete' is wheat, but when
>you concatenate them they make the word meaning hell.
>
>Any more examples of the same kind?
Three examples:
1) A sign in a Danish butcher's shop:
"LEVER KUN I DAG"
which was intended to mean "Liver only today". Unfortunately it also
means "Only alive today"
2) The signs found in most Danish lifts saying
"I FART"
This means "In use" in Danish. When Queen Elizabeth II (or Q.E. I -
depends on which part of the UK one is from) visited the Carlsberg
breweries many years ago, they made sure that all the signs had been
covered.
3) The "The End" sign in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian films:
"SLUT"
----
Det var saa hvad I fik for den femogtyveoere!
Hilsen fra Skotland
Hans
| Hans H\"{u}ttel, Office 1603 JANET: [email protected]
| LFCS, Dept. of Computer Science UUCP: ..!mcvax!ukc!lfcs!hans
| University of Edinburgh ARPA: hans%[email protected]
| Edinburgh EH9 3JZ, SCOTLAND (the country with England holding on to its tail)
|
| To: International Swedish Interest discussion list
<[email protected]>
After having studied Swedish for three months, I was fluent enough so
that I could work and I got a job as an auxiliary nurse in a nursing
home in Skane. One of the patients there was old Olga who suffered from
cancer and was in really bad shape. I had worked evening shift and Olga
was not feeling well at all when I left for the night. When returning
next morning and being briefed about what happened during the night,
the head nurse said:"och Olga, ja hon gick bort" (which is a common way
to state that somebody has died =gone away=passed away). I had only
heard that phrase in a different context, i.e. to go out or to go and
visit somebody so ignorant me replied: what? where did she go? she was
soooo sick last night! You bet the rest of the staff were embarassed
but amused all the same.
At about the same level of knowledge of Swedish, I had to go to the
doctor. One of the questions he asked me was: "kan du kasta vatten?"
(=can you throw water, which really means, can you pee). I think there
is a similar expression in English, too, but that is not my mother
tongue either so I was not familiar with that phrase and I only asked
back: where should I throw it? The poor doctor had to have the nurse
rescue him...
Yael Tagerud
[email protected]
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