hamantashen

[M M]

Here's another word (and one of my personal favorites)
to add to the German opacity debate: "Stinktier." It
means "skunk" but translates literally to "stink
animal."  The way I was taught to pronounce it, it may
as well be two separate words.  I wonder if native
German speakers can see how clever this word is.

Maia

--- Benjamin Fortson <fortson at FAS.HARVARD.EDU> wrote:
> >
> > I don't know German well enough to know what a
> German would say about the
> > transparency of "Mohntaschen," but I know that
> what is transparent to
> > foreigners is sometimes opaque to natives (e.g.,
> CUPBOARD). I remember very
> > well remarking to a German friend how clever I
> thought that the German word
> > "der Handschuh" 'glove' is. He had no idea what I
> was talking about.
>
> Point well taken; but it's interesting that the only
> two cases in German
> that I know like this are Handschuh and Handtuch,
> both of which have
> undergone some phonetic change that may have
> triggered the opacity (in
> Handschuh, the -dsch- is an affricate, potentially
> obscuring the morpheme
> boundary, and in Handtuch, the double dental has
> been degeminated). These
> considerations don't enter into the picture with
> Mohntaschen, where the
> word is not only the exact sum of its parts but
> there is no funny
> phonology either.
>         Doubtless there are other cases like
> Handschuh and Handtuch that I
> don't know about, but I'd wager they either no
> longer mean the literal sum
> of their parts or there has been a bit of
> phonological change to obscure a
> morpheme boundary.
>
> Ben


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