A few days ago I had a major epiphany. I consider myself fairly fluent in English, both when it comes to the language itself and to the cultural norms of the major societies using it, which you need to be fairly well acquainted with to truly understand a language.
And yet.
If you had asked me a week ago what a steer is, I would have told you that it is an uncastrated bull. And that an ox is a castrated one.
Because that’s what it is in German:
Stier: uncastrated male cattle
Ochse: castrated male cattle
Bulle: male cattle that has reached sexual maturity
In English however:
steer: castrated male cattle
bull: uncastrated male cattle
ox: male cattle used as a draft animal, regardless of castration status
Throughout my life I have gone through conversations without ever noticing that we were not talking about the same thing. How about that?
I wonder where the confusion between the two languages originated in the first place.
The thing is that you learn about these particular false friends when you learn the language. Nobody ever taught me about cattle, and it doesn’t come up in daily conversation enough that I ever noticed the subtle distinction until I was talking to a culinary historian online about capons. They compared them to steers, which I was going to get all huffy about because the whole point of a capon is the castration. Luckily I double checked before making a fool of myself.
It’s amazing how Disney makes versions of the songs in multiple languages. A lot of dubbed movies just keep the original English songs and add subtitles for that part. Here’s 25 languages.
Every December, the head abbot at Kiyomizudera (one of the most famous Buddhist temples in all of Japan, located (natch) in Kyoto) unveils a single kanji that is meant to summarize the year.
Last year’s kanji was 金 (kin), which means “gold” - in honor of the outstanding performance by Japanese athletes at the Olympics.
This year’s kanji is 戦 (sen or ikusa), which means “war” or “battle” - referring to the war in Ukraine.
“Freudenfreude”: Kenne mer nit, bruche mer nit, fott domet.
“sich mitfreuen”: Jo secher! Mer muss och jünne künne.
“Sommenschlacht”: Nope, nope, nope - but that’s Muphry’s Law for you. Die Schlacht an der Somme. Or as the kids say, Somme-Schlacht.
If you are inclined to be witty and critical you might go with das Schlachten an der Somme.
Heidegger… I’ll just leave this as an intellectual exercise for the reader.
You can sing along with it if you like!
