Woofter in Northern Ireland means a 'Gay boy' or homosexual. It's not widely used anymore but that's how it would be perceived here. :D
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Woofter in Northern Ireland means a 'Gay boy' or homosexual. It's not widely used anymore but that's how it would be perceived here. :D
I've spoken to some French youngsters and it was completely incomprehensible... They were switching letters in words all the time, kind of an urban youth thing I guess, made me feel sorry for those years of French courses I had in school...Quote:
Originally Posted by Kees
The (Flemish) Belgians and the Dutch also have some words that would mean different things in each country. Although it is the same language.
I cannot think of an example right now. Flemish TV is subtitled here BTW e.g. "Spoed" (Flemish E.R. like TV series)Quote:
Originally Posted by chief
Same here with Dutch tv.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kees
Sadly, the differences in dialect are so huge that people living 100 km from each other sometimes don't understand each other. We purposely teach our kids proper Dutch instead of the local dialect, just as my parents taught me.
I'm all for keepin up the old ways, but local dialects can die out asap as far as I am concerned.
It's the same in Italy. Standard Italian is taught in the schools and used in the media (newspapers, TV, etc.) but every town has its own dialect. People born before 1950 spoke the local dialect at home and didn't learn Italian until they went to school. Now that kids grow up watching television, the local dialects are dying out. We're now in the stage where younger people understand it but don't speak it. As an American, I avoid the dialects because I have enough of a headache with standard Italian.Quote:
Originally Posted by Bruno
Silver & I went to the Eisteddfod today. It's an annual celebration of Welsh culture, language, music & art. Its venue changes every year & this year it is in our capital for the first time since the 60s. Superb we thought. Let's go. So off we toddled. I know Cardiff well & I had a hard time finding the entrance as there were no signs for it. At all. Our friend, with whom we met up, had an even harder time & she was giving a speech. It was lovely to hear Welsh being spoken everywhere. We hardly hear it spoken at all locally.
What was not so lovely was that there was no English, anywhere. What was even less lovely was that whenever we spoke English, the most common reaction was a scowl. I mean, get over yourselves. Welsh is spoken & understood by only a third of the Welsh population. The rest are anglophone. It is understandable as Welsh was outlawed as a language in the 18th & 19th centuries. We live in the 21st. Welsh is now taught in all schools & undergoing a huge revival. The lack of signage & reactions were snobbish at worst & parochial at best. I am very proud to be Welsh. What I do not relish is being treated as inferior by my compatriots because I was never given the opportunity to learn our native tongue. It baffles me that there is not much more promotion of & inclusion at the Eisteddfod. It is a superb event & should be dragging the crowds in, not seemingly designed to keep out those who are not part of the club. Nationality should be national, not selective IMHO.
When we lived in Ross-on Wye we often went to Wales (Monmouth mainly), occasionally Newport where I did a few locums) and Cardiff. Apart from bilingual roadsigns never heard anyone speak Welsh. Not even in Abaristwyth (hope I got my spelling correct) which I believe is the centre of Welsh studies. IIRC only North and Mid Wales have a Welsh speaking communitiy.
On the whole the Eisteddfod was great apart from the reasons Spike mentioned. I was royally snubbed towards the end though when one woman came up to me and spoke Welsh. She was all smiles until I looked at her blankly and said sorry I don't understand Welsh yet, to which she rolled her eyes, muttered something else in Welsh, turned her nose in the air and walked away.:mad:
It's not like we haven't looked into learning Welsh, but the course fees are too expensive, especially due to the fact we both want to learn it.:( It averages out at £600 / $1200 USD for us both to do a course.
We know some sayings - Nos Da = Good night, Bore Da = Good day and some others I can say but not spell. lol For fans of Terry Pratchett, Soul Music is a good example of written Welsh with all the double letters (dd, tt, ff) which all have different sounds. It is kinda confusing with the different vowel meanings too. A Welsh Y is an english U unless it is a stand alone letter in a sentance, then it usually means THE.:thinking:
Living in Cardiff will not get you much opportunity to practice Welsh. I really learnt how to speak in English in the US and England, not in school, not in language courses.
A couple of years back there was a flemish schoolteacher teaching at a juniorschool (basisschool) she kept telling the children that they couldn't run in the hallways. She kept getting these blank stares from the kids.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kees
What she meant though was no RUNNING in the hallways but apparantly the flemish word for running (don't remember if it was wandelen or lopen) is the dutch word for walking.
lopen.
Wandelen != lopen
If we say lopen, we mean running, or walking fast..
Take my name in vain without telling me? Tut tut Silver. Now i'll have to keep an eye on this thread.... :rolleyes:Quote:
Originally Posted by Silver
Yesterday I was in Glasgow and was showing a french friend who is visiting us around PrincesSquare shopping arcade. Its a VERY posh, VERY high class indoor shopping centre. All the designer labels... you get the idea.
Anyway when we came to a shop called 'zizzi' she fell about laughing. It took some minutes for her to catch her breath and explain that 'zizi' is what a small boy might call his ***** (such as pee-pee, willy, etc). :roflmao
Edit: I just discovered that the word 'travesty' (English) is pronounced the same as the word 'travesti' (French) and the two mean VERY different things.
Reminds me of a automobile transmission shop I once saw out on Long Island in New York. The name of the shop was "Tranny Man."Quote:
Originally Posted by sidneykidney
I'm told he might have had a marketing problem in the UK.
Of course, in the states we have some famous examples of marketing goofs for international sales. The most famous was the Chevrolet Nova. How are you going to sell a car in Latin America whose name means "Doesn't go?"
My favorite, though, is Japanese products. At times, the names they come up with seem to come out of nowhere. A number of years ago, in the wake of the introduction of Gore-Tex, Japanese companies were lining up with competitive fabric treatments. (This was in my outdoor writer days.) The most successful at the time was called Entrant. That's not so bad (although I never did figure out where they came up with it). There was another that was silicone-based, as opposed to the usual PTFE. It was called, naturally enough, Sillitex. Another was called 'Dinkum." When I asked the sales rep where they'd come up with that one, he said, "Don't talk so loud. The first suggestion was 'Rectum.'"
I love this thread.
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I used to sell computers and software to furniture dealers and I had my office at one of my customers. We used to play Trivial Pursuits in the evening and I had a reputation. One day one of the salesmen comes to me because he and his wife liked to play Scrabble and his wife had bought some Scrabble dictionaries and had called him with some fun new words. There was one word that he couldn't remember, but he remembered the definition and he thought, given my Trivial talents, that I could tell him what the word was. The definition was to masturbate by rubbing up against another person. Well, I have never met a word I didn't like and, about ten years before, I had read an article in Time magazine about perverts in the Paris Metrò, so I said, "The pervert is a frotteur and the act itself is frottage". Well, people began to argue with me and pull out dictionaries, but this wasn't a word that you would find in the type of dictionary you would find in an office. We ended up calling the Chicago Public Library, which had a hotline number for answers to just this type of question. So, I called and asked for the definition of "frottage". The young woman came back in a few minutes and said, "There are four definitions ... the first is a bandage that you put over skin that is itching. The second is a type of artwork made by rubbing, such as taking a rubbing of a gravestone. The third is a technique of writing music where you write the notes directly to paper without playing them and the fourth is the masturbate by rubbing up against another person." Okay, I thought that this was the end of the story but about three weeks later Herman Miller (a big office furniture company) called all the salesreps to the showroom to introduce a new line of fabrics made from raw silk called ... Frottage! The salesreps from my customer began to laugh and one asked, "Do you know what that means?" The reply was, well, it does have that meaning, but no one will know." "Well, I'm a dumb furniture salesman from Chicago and I know what it means!" Six months later, Herman Miller changed the name.
Years ago in Norway I was talking to my cousin about the giant moose I saw while hiking that day. I used a hand gesture to describe the size and he started laughing. He thought I was talking about a mouse. The Norwegian word for mouse is mus. The word for moose is elk (maybe Bjorn or The Pastor can give us the correct spelling).
And there's always Dell computers....the word "Del" (pronounced the same way as Dell in Dutch) means tramp or slut.
Therefore a lot of people buy slut computers.
In the early 1990s (to the best of my recollection), Nike ran a TV commercial that only lasted a couple of days. It featured hundreds of African tribesmen with spears running across the Savannah wearing Nikes. One of the tribesmen stops in front of the camera and says something in Swahili. It was translated in a subtitle as "Just do it". Well, some professor of Swahili called the newspaper (the New York Times, I think) and said, "What he's really saying is, ‘These are too tight, can I have another pair?’” Nike was embarrassed and asked the ad agency if they knew what he was saying and, if so, why did they do it, and the answer was, “we thought no one would understand Swahili.”