linguoboy wrote:Every once in a while, I will completely misparse a German compound word and confuse the hell out of myself. Earlier this week, it was Herbstacker, which my brain divided into herb + stack- + -er and could make no sense of. Only after I Googled it did I realise it was actually Herbst + Acker.
I do that all the time! I've had the same problem in both German and Estonian. Sometimes it can be rather fun actually... you can end with hilarious misunderstandings.
Estonian
puuteekraan : the first time I saw it I was imagining some sort of barrel-like keg full of tea with a wooden spigot attached, since I parsed it as
puu +
tee +
kraan (wood + tea + faucet). It's actually
puute +
ekraan (touch-screen).
Someone here at Unilang had a great one in Estonian,
kõrvalaine (
kõrval +
aine, "academic minor") as
kõrva +
laine "ear curl," thinking of it as a curl of hair above the ear. Makes sense to me.
Estonian
söögivaheaeg really does have two different meanings:
söögi +
vaheaeg lunch hour or coffee/snack break, lit. "the break [vaheaeg] for food [söök]" and
söögivahe +
aeg time between meals, lit. "the time [aeg] between meals [söögivahe]". At first I learned only one of the two meanings so imagine my confusion when I read
Söögivaheaegadel pole kasulik midagi süüа as "it's not healthy to eat anything during lunch breaks" when it's actually "it's not healthy to eat anything between meals". (Ehh... so when you are you supposed to eat then, if not during lunch breaks?)
Actually in Estonian there endless possibilities along these lines. Like if you parse
laekaunistus (
lae +
kaunistus "ceiling decoration") incorrectly you end up with (
laeka + unistus "dream of a chest/coffer".
Puurauk (
puur +
auk "borehole") becomes
puu +
rauk "feeble old tree" and so on.
Salamander is a loanword that simply means "salamander" just the same as in English, but it can be mis-read as
sala +
mander "secret continent." I think there is a name for this sort of wordplay when it is done deliberately, but I don't remember what it is. They are used as a sort of pun.
linguoboy wrote:The other fun thing I discovered from Googling is that Russian has a monosyllabic equivalent, namely зябь. (There may be a technical/dialectal equivalent in English, but I only know paraphrases like "a winter field plowed for spring planting".)
In Estonian it can either have two parts or three (
sügiskünd "autumn-plowing" or
sügiskünnipõld "autumn-plowing's-field"). It is an autumn (not winter) field in German as well. In springtime there's
kevadkünd and
Frühlingsacker.