Quite simply, this post will be about the wonderful similarities the Danish language has with our own English tongue. Over the last three weeks I have collected a pitiful clump of photos of words and signs I have found while wandering through Copenhagen. I have tried to add an explanation as to why I took each photo, but to be honest I’m not promising much.
This is what I call my sister when her real name gets boring. I had no idea it was an actual word in the Danish language until I saw these letters lashed against the side of a building. Thanks to my Danish language classes I now know it means: ‘language’…. Rather disappointing really, I was expecting ‘bloated noise machine’.
It said DONG. I took the photo. It amused me at the time.
A load of Swedish-looking people got off this bus. I love the way the ‘fart’ has been cunningly blended into another word – ha, as though we’d never find out. It means Scandinavian Touring, which again is pretty dull compared to my thrill of finding it. Actually, when I took the photo I was smiling quite a bit, and two women at a bus stop noticed my stupid grin. They must have thought I was ‘bus spotter’ (a less glamorous but also less isolated breed of train spotter) and had just secured on camera a real corker.
This annoyed me. Don’t called your shop ‘7 Eleven’, and then put a sign below saying ‘open 24 hours’. It’s disgusting.
Apparently a posh, swanky restaurant, no one with any real idea of the English language would call their business ‘Gorm’. My jaw dropped when I saw the name…
If we had cooler names for our religious texts then more people would go to church. I’m fairly sure of this although I haven’t actually done any research into my hypothesis, as yet. However, if I had the opportunity to read a Lightning Bible rather than the Old Knackered Testament, attend a Rambunctious Church and sing Sassy Hymns, I’d be more interested in getting to know the beard upstairs. Think about it Mr. Pope.
Out of the corner of my eye I thought this said ‘bog roll’. I then assumed it said ‘bog and roll’, as though it was an instruction one must follow. In fact, it means bookshelves: it was a bookshop. I didn’t stop to look inside, but am sure I could have maintained the lexical similarity between the English and the Danish words, if only I’d found some Woolf.
This is what I call my sister when her real name gets boring. I had no idea it was an actual word in the Danish language until I saw these letters lashed against the side of a building. Thanks to my Danish language classes I now know it means: ‘language’…. Rather disappointing really, I was expecting ‘bloated noise machine’.
It said DONG. I took the photo. It amused me at the time.
A load of Swedish-looking people got off this bus. I love the way the ‘fart’ has been cunningly blended into another word – ha, as though we’d never find out. It means Scandinavian Touring, which again is pretty dull compared to my thrill of finding it. Actually, when I took the photo I was smiling quite a bit, and two women at a bus stop noticed my stupid grin. They must have thought I was ‘bus spotter’ (a less glamorous but also less isolated breed of train spotter) and had just secured on camera a real corker.
This annoyed me. Don’t called your shop ‘7 Eleven’, and then put a sign below saying ‘open 24 hours’. It’s disgusting.
Apparently a posh, swanky restaurant, no one with any real idea of the English language would call their business ‘Gorm’. My jaw dropped when I saw the name…
If we had cooler names for our religious texts then more people would go to church. I’m fairly sure of this although I haven’t actually done any research into my hypothesis, as yet. However, if I had the opportunity to read a Lightning Bible rather than the Old Knackered Testament, attend a Rambunctious Church and sing Sassy Hymns, I’d be more interested in getting to know the beard upstairs. Think about it Mr. Pope.
Out of the corner of my eye I thought this said ‘bog roll’. I then assumed it said ‘bog and roll’, as though it was an instruction one must follow. In fact, it means bookshelves: it was a bookshop. I didn’t stop to look inside, but am sure I could have maintained the lexical similarity between the English and the Danish words, if only I’d found some Woolf.
Ha ha. Great stuff. I have a blog at http://www.rottendanish.com commenting on the difficulties of translating English into Danish. Yours is a nice compliment about how untranslated Danish may confuse the English brain :) Well done.
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