this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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True, but having synonyms for sleep/rest and peacefully/in peace might be tough. Though I’m now realizing that “in peace” is a complicated phrase, given that peace here would be a locative attribute. But it is Latin and would therefore be pretty accessible to Italian speakers.
I don’t know, but I realized this year after living in Germany for four years, that I was saying the wrong word for humid. Instead I was saying “gay,” basically, though the connotation is slightly closer to queer than gay (if a right wing politician talked about gay people, it would feel normal. Non bigots use mostly this term, but if a right wing politician called them schwul instead of homosexuell, it would feel very bad). They sound pretty similar, so imagine if there was a bad joke about queer skies tonight or something, that was frequently made by bigots. I knew the word for gay, I just thought they got the word for gay from humidity, the way English got gay from happy.
I have a light accent that only about 20% of people in casual conversations pick up on. Casual conversations, like those about the weather. I’m pretty sure everyone thought I was just a homophobe for a long time 🤦
Sorry super long comment, but non native speakers make weird fucking mistakes sometimes
God I couldn’t get to sleep last night, it was just too gay in my bedroom.
Yup, basically. The worst part is, because it is an existing joke, nobody ever corrected me, they thought it was intentional.
I literally only found out because I said it two days in a row to a queer coworker, and the second time, she was like “you know that’s not right, right?” and I’m pretty sure the blood immediately drained from my face.
I then told everyone I knew in case they’d been feeling uncomfortable around me :(
We have but it's a bit more complicated. "Schwul" is the old form (for hot and humid) and changed in analogy to "kühl" (~chilly/cool/cold). Simultaneously, homosexuality is associated with warmth for some reason. There is also "warmer Bruder" (warm brother).
So "schwul" was historically used for both senses "hot and humid" and figuratively for "gay", the literal sense changed vowel to be similar to another temperature related word, while the figurative sense didn't and they separated into two distinct words.
Extra difficult since the ü-sound isn't easy for many 2nd language learners so this happens quite often even if people know I suppose.
Thank you so much! I have an etymological dictionary for German, but I haven’t found anything for slang- do you know if something like that exists?
wiktionary is quite resourceful. Often the English page is even better but it's worth checking both.