Sunday, April 17, 2011

Culture and Language - all the fun mashing them up

Maybe this is not really funny but on a perspective it's funny that many languages share the same pronunciation but they mean very differently. I've been reading the comments of Finnish people (thanks to Google Translate I understand Finnish!). 


The video is on how Finnish surnames mean funny things in Japanese. Like Aho (means "idiot") and Ikarainen ("squid" and "next year"). Reversely, according to one of the comments, some Japanese surnames also mean funny things in Finnish like Takakura (it means something dirty like shit or something - the translation wasn't perfect so I can't figure it out) and Nakata (means "throw").

I'm sure it applies to other languages as well. Like Japanese surname "Ibu" means "mother" in Indonesian. It's probably a little hard to find a language to mock Indonesian surnames because our surnames are a little weird - some of them are derived from Chinese surname, like mine - but I'd really looking forward to knowing any language that has similar words to Indonesian surname, just for fun :)

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