In English we call it "Marshmallow".
Asklemmy
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
What a mysterious and beautiful language.
I mean, “marshmallow” has a more interesting derivation than most of the other words I’ve seen so far.
Althaea officinalis, the marsh mallow or marshmallow, is a species of flowering plant indigenous to Europe, Western Asia and North Africa, which is used in herbalism and as an ornamental plant. A confection made from the root since ancient Egyptian times evolved into today's marshmallow treat.
TIL.
In Icelandic it’s sykurpúði = sugar cushion 😄
This one I can really get behind
In Danish it's skumfidus which means foam thingie.
Literally “foam thingie”? I love that!
Am danish can confirm, it translates to "foam thingy". Never actually thought about it before lol, though a fun name indeed
I'm German and that is bullshit. Never heard of mäusespeck, everyone just calls them marshmallows and they are labeled as marshmallows in the store
EDIT: I was made aware that the Problem seems be that im not a boomer. 30 years ago, when i wasnt alive, they seemed to be called this. In my WG there are people over 30 though and they also never heard of this (hessen)
It was absolutely called Mäusespeck when I was a kid, but that's 35+ years ago.
Where do you live? Mäusespeck is even in the Wikipedia article:
Im deutschsprachigen Raum ist die Süßware häufig unter der Produktbezeichnung Mausespeck oder Mäusespeck erhältlich.
I'm German too and we totally used Mäusespeck in the 80s/90s. I guess you're just younger, today people know what marshmallows are (and speak better English in general).
Classic Germans discussing about their own language
Mäusespeck exists, but it's something slightly different. It's the sugared rhombus of the fluffy stuff, and packed in those triangle clear bags.
Reading about it, it seems they are in fact all the same. Even the white haribo mice. TIL.
We call it 棉花糖 in Chinese, which translates to cotton candy... Which gets confusing if we're also talking about cotton candy (the fluffy kind).
In Dutch it's also marshmallows, but also commonly spek (bacon), spekjes (bacon pieces) or spekkies (in this case it's clear you're not talking about bacon).
Now you have me curious since this is the second language, why bacon?
The original candy looked like this: https://cdn.webshopapp.com/shops/282420/files/297921342/890x820x1/confiserie-a-lancienne-spekjes-roze-wit-doos-2-kg.jpg
Which with some imagination can be similar to bits of bacon. Marshmallows are somewhat similar candy so the name is used for that too at times.
I’m pretty sure alot of languages just imported marshmallow.
I come from the german speaking part of Switzerland and I don’t think I ever heard someone actually use the word “Mäusespeck” although it certainly would he understood I think. Everybody around me calls them marshmallows.
I live in NRW and have never heard anyone call them Mäusespeck either
In Polish we call them pianka, diminutive for foam
Nein, davon weiß ich absolut nichts. Das ist regional allerhöchstens oder ein Synonym für Marshmallow.
Google translate "No, I know absolutely nothing about that. That's regional at most or a synonym for marshmallow."
You should name it sugar pillow or better we should all name it sugar pillow in our language.
Skumfidus 🇩🇰
"Foam trick" i guess, is the literal translation.
Fidus is a weird word.
We didn't bother translating, so it's marshmallow. Sometimes written phonetically, maršmelou.
Here in Mexico (Spanish) is known as Bombón. A quick Google search says that apparently comes from the repetition of the french word 'bon'
It is worth to mention that, despite most of the countries in Latin America speak Spanish, things have different names in different countries, even if it's the same language.
According to Wikipedia, marshmallows are also known as
nube, esponjita, malvavisco, fringuel, jamón o suncho
Never heard of that in German. It's just marshmallows with a generic German accent instead. But it's cool to learn something new. Which region says that, OP?
In Norwegian marshmallow is just marshmallow, but if something has marshmallow bits or marshmallow like properties (like say the white stuff in a bag of Haribos) it's called "skum", which means foam
My native language is German but I lived in Spain for a long time and there they call them "nubes", clouds.
žužu in Czech (ž as the first sound in Zhukov), but it's often called marshmallow as well (especially the iconic/most common form).