World Wide Words discusses the word perverb (or portmanteau proverb), meaning a perverse proverb, such as ‘Don’t count your chickens before you can walk’; and portmantreau proverbs, meaning those with one letter added, such as ‘Fine swords butter no parsnips’.

This would be something like ‘Die dümmsten Bauern haben kurze Beine’.

This doesn’t seem to cover the type ‘Geteiltes Leid ist doppeltes Leid’ (‘A sorrow shared is a sorrow doubled’). I think I got that from the amusing Erlangen publication ‘Was lefft’.

Meanwhile, you can test your German proverbs with the Goethe Institut, whose pictures are extremely mystifying.

And Udos Lexikon adds to Feld-, Wald- und Wiesenanwalt Feld-, Wald- und Wiesenübersetzer.

I’m just experimenting with Flickr (thanks, Isabella!)

I am using Flickr because a friend of mine wants to put some pages online about birds and plants in Fürth.

The Apotheke is one of the temples of German shopping life.

Language Log (Geoff Pullum) berichtet, in Kansas wird schon wieder unterrichtet, dass die englische Sprache vor 500 Jahren von Gott erschaffen wurde (er hat sich wohl einiges von Deutsch und Französisch abgeguckt). Die Theorie heißt “intelligentes Design“. Allerdings sind keine Linguistik-Experten bereit, als Zeugen aufzutreten:

bq. Six years ago, when conservatives previously held a majority of seats on the Kansas board of education, they established guidelines encouraging schools to give equal time to the theory of linguistic creationism, which claims that English was created directly by God five hundred years ago at the start of the Great Vowel Shift so that the King James Bible could be translated into it. But this triggered a backlash, and they lost control of the board, which repealed the guidelines. Now that conservatives are back in a majority position, they are instead promoting the teaching of the intelligent design theory. But linguists are not willing to appear at their scheduled hearings on the subject.

Many of my students of English would have disagreed that the English language was the result of intelligent design.

Meanwhile, in a parallel development, recent events have cast doubt on the suggestion from Texas that Tony Blair is the result of intelligent design.

Spätere Anmerkung / Later note:
Apparently this story is not true, but was invented by Geoff Pullum as a joke (see comments on TEFL Smiler). It just proves that not only do many Americans have strange ideas about Britain and Germany, but I have strange ideas about the USA.

Carlos Ferrero Martín, in Las palabras son pistolas cargadas, deals in some depth (in Spanish) with the Grandiloquent Dictionary:

bq. This is the result of an ongoing project to collect and distribute the most obscure and rare words in the English language. It also contains a few words which do not have equivalent words in English. At present, the dictionary contains approximately 2300 words, though it is constantly growing.

The dictionary can be consulted online or the current version downloaded as a PDF file (including, oddly, 100 words not included in the online dictionary).

Martín points out that most of the words are of Greek or Latin origin. He points out that junta is not uncommon. I noticed scatology and schwa at a quick glance. Should be taken with a large pinch of salt.

The Double-Tongued Word Wrester has an entry on the American term soup bunch.

bq. soup bunch n. a bundle of vegetables and herbs used in the preparation of soup.

Grant queries the suggested German origin via ‘suppebund’, saying it’s a rare term. Actually, the German term is Suppenbund, or at least it was the only one I knew when I lived in Cologne, but here in Bavaria all I encounter is Suppengemüse and Wurzelwerk.

The Variantenwörterbuch des Deutschen does not neglect this:

bq. Suppengemüse CH D (ohne südost); Wurzelwerk A; Suppenpackl A-west (Tyrol); Suppengrün A D (ohne nordwest).

So was the practice of selling soup vegetables like this taken to the USA by Germans?

LATER NOTE: following up a link given in a comment, I found that wooden soup vegetables can be bought for children. I think it would make an interesting still life, sculpture or knitted piece too. Here’s the link and picture:

High prices for Swiss products largely result from restrictive import legislation. In future, any product permitted for sale in the EU is to be permitted for sale in Switzerland. Neue Züricher Zeitung:

bq. So dürfen nach den heute geltenden Regeln zum Beispiel keine Lebensmittel
mit der Bezeichnung «Sahne» in die Schweiz eingeführt und hier verkauft
werden. Sie müssten zuvor umetikettiert werden, weil hier nur die
Beschriftung «Rahm» zugelassen ist. Landwirtschaftsprodukte aus dem Ausland
unterliegen allerdings in der Schweiz noch andern Schutzmechanismen. Doch
auch für Zahnpasten besteht das gleiche Problem: Während in der EU der
Aufdruck «zahnmedizinisch vorbeugend» erlaubt ist, darf sich das Produkt in
der Schweiz nur mit seinen «kariesverhütenden Eigenschaften» anpreisen.

This is called the Cassis-de-Dijon principle. The term normally applies within the EU, referring to a case in which Germany refused to import Creme de Cassis because it was neither a liqueur nor a beer (only 15% – 20% alcohol).

Thanks to Bruno Aeschbacher at the swisstrans group. (See Bruno’s excellent list of translators’ mailing lists)