Alternative title: Damn You Danish! *shakes fist*
Not that I’ve made any serious errors lately, but I did come
close. The Danish word for
“savings bonds” is “obligation” so when asked, in Danish, if we have
obligations, I was *this* close to raising my hand.
Obligations? Yeah, I’ve got obligations! I have two mortgages and a child in
childcare, a car that needs maintenance and gas, a husband who seems to keep
eating food despite him being fully grown so stop eating so much, m’kay? Obligations? Oh, I got your obligations right here, buddy.
Uh, wait, obligations means bonds? Er, um, no. No,
I have no bonds. Totally bondless
here. Double-O-uh-oh, that's me.
Thank god I’m always about 5 seconds slower in Danish. Prevents some silly errors.
Then later I was asked if I had “strøm” and I was completely
flummoxed. Some hand waving and
danglish later, we had ascertained that I had indeed a fully charged battery on
my computer and yes, Jesper may borrow my charger.
Is it weird that my brain kept wanting to add “und Drang”
after hearing strøm? I have either too much education or not
enough intelligence, and I’m not sure which. But it definitely means I’ve had too many language classes,
that’s for sure.
Meanwhile, when I write in Danish, I run it through Google
Translate to catch the egregious errors.*
Like in spelling. One wrong
letter may not seem like a lot, but it’s the difference between the
government-mandated garbage bins and government-mandated garbage bans. Or the difference between putting a gin
to your lips or a gun to your lips.
Or being stuck in a traffic-jam or stuck in a cow. Okay, that last one only works if you
are writing Danish (kø vs. ko), but you can see where a girl writing about
farming might want to be careful about where she puts her Ø.
Sometimes I just write the wrong word. I wanted to write a sentence describing
how a virus invades a cell and turns it into a virus factory. Fine. Except my brain stuck “invander” in for “invader” rather
than “angriber”. “Invander” is a word, one I read all the time, it
means “immigrant.” So my viruses
were immigrating to the bacteria cell and working in factories there. Probably for below minimum wage and
without access to union representation.
I was highly amused with myself for a while.
It goes the other way as well. The Danish word for clouds is “sky” and my little brain just
will not read it that way. “What
do you mean there is sky today? Isn’t there always sky??” I say. By the way, saying that in Danish means
you are being witty and clever in regards to the weather. “Yes,” laughs the Dane, “I suppose we
do always have clouds.”
*Confusion*
I have a lovely image of the Danes meeting the English and
exchanging vocabulary.
“Så hvad er den der?” Asks the Viking, angrily stabbing his
finger up at the heavens, obscured, as England always is during certain times
of the year, with clouds. He did
not travel all the way across the North Sea for more of the same damn weather.
“’Wot ‘ar dem der?’
Why good fellow, that there is the sky!” Says the portly merchant,
cowering with the other villagers in the town square.
“Sku? Det er en
god ord. Jeg ta’ det og alle jeres
gul! Nu!”
Or maybe it was the other way around, since English is
better known for stealing words from other languages.
“Øv, der er altid sky her!” says Svend Svendsen (Barbarian
Invader Inc., est. 875 CE, “We invade, so
you will pay”), shaking his fist at the clouds.
“He’s put off by… what was that? The “sky”? I
say, what a nice word. If I get
out of this alive, I may want to use it in conversation with my neighbors over
in Little-Big-Watting-Up-Downs-on-the-Slough. I’ll appear very worldly and posh,” thinks social climber
and sometime merchant, Horatio Bucket.
That’s Boo-kay, dear.
And the more tired I am, the more mistakes I make. Thankfully, the Danish Boy is there to
mangle English from time to time, for my amusement. The other night he told me that the chimney swiper had come
by for the chimneys.
And then he tells me about the new government
substitutions. You know, where
they give you money for stuff. Uh, subsides? Yeah, that’s what I said, substitutions.
*Hugs him* Isn't he cute?
* I do NOT write
in English and then put it into GT to translate for me. That would be the epitome of
stupid. GT makes for some
hilarious translations. It is good
enough to give you an idea of what was written and it’s a fair dictionary
(better than my normal English-Danish dictionary in regards to farm and
technical vocabulary) but for the love of god, don’t use it to write your
Danish for you!
