Garth Wallace wrote:
>
> S�ren Kuklau wrote:
> > On 3/24/2002 10:28 PM, Garth Wallace apparently wrote exactly the
> > following:
> >
> >> Because that sounds like it should be a garden (as in, a place filled
> >> with plants tended by people) for children, whereas in English
> >> "kindergarten" means the first grade of school (coming the year before
> >> "first grade").
> >
> > Umm well, but "Kinder" means "children" and "Garten" means "garden"...
>
> Right, but "kinder" and "garten" are not words in English--that is,
> while the compound "kindergarten" was borrowed, its components were not.
> So it's a single unit in English. A German might hear "kindergarten"
> and think "child's garden", but an English-speaker wouldn't hear the
> component terms and would just think of kindergarten the word in
> English, which means the first year of school (in America anyway; the
> British have a bizarre school system that I don't pretend to understand).
Hmmmm. I didn't go to kindergarten. Sad. The old lady down the street
taught me to read. She also taught me to play chess. Wonderful old lady.
German is loaded with words built of other words. It is actually fun to
make German words. However, Fernsehapparat is a real word but rarely
used. An old friend of mine laughingly said, "Let's go to the
Milschgeschaeftkoenigen." I dislike icecream so I declined. This
particular friend perplexed Germans by talking about Verkehrsmarmalade.
A really good one was the name a graduate student gave to SCLERA (Santa
Catalina Laboratory for Experimental Relativity by Astrometry). He
called it the Sonnenbeobachtungseinrichtung. Pretty good if you can get
your mouth all the way around it.
Chuck
--
... The times have been,
That, when the brains were out,
the man would die. ... Macbeth
Chuck Simmons [EMAIL PROTECTED]
