Ah fuck that’s one long mess of several words put together…
Let’s see…
What the fuck does lösch do in that word???
Hilfe (help or assistance)
Leistung (act, performance or service)
Lösch (delete, remove, extinguish)
Fahrzeug (vehicle)
Hilfeleistungloschgruppenfahrze, or Extinguishment help service vehicle
wait this isn’t just a shitpost THIS IS REAL???
Yes. German is a Lego-block language. The example in the image is extreme, but there are lots of “combination” words like that.
For example, glove is Handschuh, which means hand-shoe. A shoe for your hand.
I used to work in a plant with a lot of people from Bosnia. One of them said when she first started working there her English was limited, but she knew the German word for “glove” and asked for some “hand shoes.”
No one in their right mind would put this word into a children’s book though, it’s absolutely not colloquial. So I suspect sometijng weird going on in the original image.
I’ve seen long compound words in children’s book recently. Could be real.
Some kids get hyper fixated on cool stuff like firefighters, cars, dinosaurs,… and love learning new words in that topic even or especially if they are complicated.
Sometimes those little brains can do a lot more than many give them credit for.
Can schadenfreude be broken up like this?
Schaden = damage
Freude = joy
Thanks.
Interesting how that doesn’t seem to fit, to me, with how I’ve heard its meaning described as “Pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others”.
Fuck I missed gruppen, is just group, autocorrect added it
This is a satirical book right?
It’s German, so probably not.
For the longest time I believed Germany had no comedians, then someone told me that Mystery of the Druids was meant to be satire of English Police.
Then I was like “Okay that explains a lot.”
Come on, I know there’s Germans about. What the hell does it say lol? Here’s what Claude says:
The fire department’s rescue and firefighting group vehicle… It transports firefighters, ladders, tools, hoses… (text cuts off)
So I am guessing “Hilfeleistungslöschgruppenfahrzeug” is “rescue and firefighting group vehicle?”
Its more like “assistance for firefighting group vehicle”.
Probably a "supporting firefighter group vehicle“ to be exact.
Edit: this word is kind of bizarre, because it is a composition of 3 compound words which each are compound words themselves.
Hilfe-leistung (Help Giving = Support) Lösch-Gruppe (Extinguishing Group = Firefighters) Fahr-zeug (Drive Thing = Vehicle)
Yeah, that’s even better. Translating these kind of words is quite hard.
American here who studied German for eight years, graduated with a minor in German, and lived there for one year:
I’m not sure how to properly translate this children’s book.
The long word breaks into easily-understood pieces:
“help-ability-extinguish-group-travel-thing”
But in order to get a proper concept back out of it you need to know what order the pieces go together in and I don’t know that.
travel-thing is a vehicle.
help-ability is emergency services
Beyond that I have to guess — Is group-travel-thing a crew vehicle, making this a crew vehicle for extinguishing?
Or maybe extinguish-group is a fire crew and this is a vehicle for fire crews?
Either way I feel like the author is using a lot more word-parts than they should have to for what is (clearly in the picture) better described as a pump truck.
Any reason you didn’t stay in Germany?
It was a study-abroad year and the year ended. I never had the permission to stay and work.
Do you think you would have given the opportunity?
At the time, no. It wasn’t in my plans at all. Now I think about it sometimes.
I had to look it up, it’s the technical term for a certain firefighting vehicle.
In particular, what distinguishes it from a normal crew firefighting vehicle (Löschgruppenfahrzeug) is its equipment for “Technische Hilfeleistung” (technical help-providing) which basically means it carries equipment beyond basic extinguishing agents. If you’re physically stuck in your car after a crash, a Hilfeleistungslöschgruppenfahrzeug has to arrive to cut open the doors.
A Hilfeleistungslöschgruppenfahrzeug
A (small) Löschgruppenfahrzeug. Note that it only contains firefighting equipment.
No, that’s actually the official term for a very specific type of vehicle. It’s a hybrid between a Löschgruppenfahrzeug (a multipurpose firefighting vehicle) and a Rüstwagen (which carries equipment for light non-firefighting purposes).
People who actually deal with them just say “HLF”.
Gut Wehr!
Full disclosure to avoid claiming false valor: I’m not a firefighter; my girlfriend used to work for a special purpose vehicle company.
The other commenters have already explained it diligently, but I wanted to hop on for something related.
As a German speaker, it actually irritates me a little, that English doesn’t agglutinate. Let’s take the word “gum ball machine”.
Which is it? It’s a machine. So are “gum” and “ball” descriptors of “machine”? Well no, they’re all nouns. But they’re not all subjects or objects of a sentence. They’re one subject together. But they’re not written together.
If I had a red gum ball machine, is it a red machine made out of gum that produces balls? Ok, it can also be spelt gumball machine. But that’s still multiple words per concept.
I like my nouns to be one word if it’s one thing and one subject.
“Gumball” is the only correct spelling; “gum ball” is incorrect. So the gum and ball are at least connected. But you’re right about “red gumball machine.” The gumballs or machine might be what’s red.
Ah thanks, I googled it quickly and it gave me both (as titles on webpages, not like in a dictionary). But with the number of spelling mistakes on shopping sites, I shouldn’t have trusted the titles alone :)
LOL looks like a German advent calendar, not even a book!
Fake news!
It’s one of those books that lets you flap it open to reveal the Feuerwehrleute, Leitern, Werkzeuge and Schläuche within.
Ahhhh I was kinda wondering why there was an educational advent calendar 😅
Hanz! Get ze Hilfeleistungslöschgruppenfahrzeug!
Very useful for when he’s done getting the Flammenwerfer
Die post ist pissenwasser!
The mail is pissing-water?
We make these huge, clunky compound words so that we can introduce new abbreviations. That’s a HLF.
I mean, yeah. This is an important part of the German language. They create composite words to describe a thing, and learning to break it down into its constituents is a fundamental part of reading German.
In which context would you use Hilfeleistungslöschgruppenfahrzeug instead of Feuerwehrfahrzeug?
When you’re a fireman whose job is to plan which vehicles go where or when you need to precisely specify which type of fire vehicle. Non-firemen usually say Feuerwehrfahrzeug or even Feuerwehrauto.
But the firemen would just call it by it’s abbreviation HLF of course
And obviously there is a norm for all Vehicle types in use. Here is a list of all of them https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feuerwehrfahrzeuge_in_Deutschland#Feuerwehrfahrzeug-Typenliste_der_aktuell_genormten_Fahrzeuge
I haven’t tried, but I feel like that concept would be easy for me to grasp because I already find myself doing it with English if I happen to know the old words, Latin or otherwise, used to construct the modern ones.
It makes more context to translate “Zeug” as “tool” in most compound words, it is its original meaning like in Feuerzeug, Flugzeug, Fahrzeug, Rüstzeug.
In English, it would be a “thingie.” Like Germans are constantly trying to remember the word “lighter” and they’re like, “you know, the whatsit, the… fire… thingie.”
No, it’s literally not. It is “tool” or “gadget”. Not just any object or dingsbums.
Zeug used to mean something different back in the day.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear about that being a tongue in cheek remark.
It’s that German humor.
It’s a good joke but I don’t think it’s too far off. The comment about it being “tools” kinda falls short of explaining things like Spielzeug=toy (play thing) and Schlagzeug=drum (beating/striking thing). I think “thing” is better. Might be somewhere in between though. Ich weiß nicht…
It’s also one of the most difficult parts of learning German as an adult, despite being a relatively simple syntactic rule and something we kinda-sorta emulate in English. The other part, at least for me, were false friends. Also sorry to all the lurking Germans waiting to comment, I forgot all of my German the moment I graduated college.
Oh I thought those were false cognates
That’s something different. False cognates are words that look related even tho they are not and often have a similar meaning that makes it look even harder to be related. False friends often are related but have a very different meaning. Like the German word “eventuell” meaning “maybe” which is very bad if you use it wrong. Unlike the false cognate “emoji” meaning “picture sign” and – etymologically speaking – having nothing to do with emoticon despite its similar meaning. Which is more a linguistic fun fact than any problem for learners.
Another example of a false friend:
German: Bekommen (to get), English: Become (werden)
Hence a joke I often heard while learning English:
Guest: “I become a steak.”
Waiter: “Well, I do hope you won’t, but I could ask the chef, if you insist…”
Whilst quite a lot of words are pretty much the same in both languages, “wie” in Dutch means “who” whilst in German it means “how”.
Having learned Dutch first, I can tell you that when I was first learning German the expression “Wie geht’s” tended to give me a serious mental hiccup when I was trying to talk to German people.
As a German I can assure you that false friends are something you scare away all pupils (regardless of age). I have very intense memories of our English teacher correcting us again and again.
Regarding the composita in German: we are moving more towards the English approach by splitting these word monstrousities with hyphens. E.g. Donaudampfschifffahrtsamt may be spelled Donau-Dampfschifffahrts-Amt. Its way easier to read and write. While the hyphenated spelling is not something that is used often officially, it got more popular in the last decades.
oh Christ, please. it really is just the lack of spaces that make them a nightmare.
My biggest issue with Duolingo trying to learn German honestly. Sure I can read a compound word when presented with it, but fucking Duo is like “Cool… now spell it… bitch”
German is phonetic though - once you know how pronunciation maps to the alphabet (and certain compounds), it becomes easier to spell any new word. It’s actually why there’s no Spelling Bee in German.
I learnt to write after hearing in Grundschule. It doesn’t work that well.
That’s your issue? Not adjective declination?
I’m nearly at the end of Duolingo’s German content and spelling has mostly been quite easy (as a native English speaker). You want a spelling challenge, try French.
Fucking French. ‘we’re never, ever going to say this ‘h’ character, but you still need it to spell words correctly because fuck you, that’s why.’
English isn’t exactly innocent there. See knight, plumber, mnemonic, pterodactyl.
Well those are words descendent from Latin and Greek.
Yeah but the spelling ‘normally’ would have been updated to match English pronunciation. That’s what happens in most languages. As I understand there were two issues:
- Some dictionary writers (ca. late 1400s IIRC) wanted spellings that seemed fancier like French and Latin, which is why e.g. the silent B in debt was added ‘artificially’.
- The printing press was invented right in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift so old spellings got “locked in” even though spoken English continued to change significantly for a long time afterward.
I gave up on duolingo very quickly because it had a ton of clearly wrong stuff too. Drops and Rosetta Stone have much better content for learning German.
I once talk to a guy that was learning portuguese all by himself using Langenscheidt’s portuguese course.
They are pretty neat.
Alles gut. Deine Vergesslichkeit hindert mich nicht daran, hier zu pfostieren.
Doch
Google translate says “the rescue firefighting group vehicle”
Gesundheit.
Danke
TIL that löschen is also used to mean extinguishing fires. Firefighter support vehicle, I guess?
When I was in school many notebooks came with a loose sheet to absorb the ink from our fountain pens. These are called “Löschpapier” (extinguishing paper).
A common joke was, to say you should toss the “Löschpapier” into a fire to extinguish it.
I tried it once. It burned quite well unfortunately.
Hilfeleistungs-Löschgruppen-Fahrzeug is a very odd composite word for Germans too. It’s not commonly used, this is probably "Amtsdeutsch“, a bureaucratic way of naming things as accurately as possible. Mostly used like that by government institutions and Microsoft help documents in german.
See also: Umschaltfeststelltaste (Caps Lock) und Gruppenrichtlinienbearbeitungsprogramm (Group policy Editor).
Shudders. This is why I (as a native German speaker) prefer english documentation.
I’ve played around with changing Windows system languages before and was indeed thrown off by the slew of Gruppenrichtlinienbearbeitungsprogramm-type calques. Glad to know that Germans also find this offputting ;)
Löschen can also mean to offload cargo from a ship if you were only thinking about to delete as a second meaning
Literally it’s: Supportserviceextinguishinggroupvehicle, it’s a kind of all-rounder firetruck and the most commen one.
The “Hilfeleistung” means that it isn’t just for firefighting but also other kinds calls “Technische Hilfe” / technical support
and the “Löschgruppe” refers to the core capability to fight fires as well as the personell on board, a “Gruppe” is a specific tactical unit in german firefighting of 9 people
Löschen can also mean to offload cargo from a ship…
I did not know this one either, and it seems even more different from delete/erase/extinguish. I had to look this up; wiktionary says that the unloading sense is actually from a different root (MND lössen, cognate with “los”), which may have changed due to association with the “erasure” sense, particularly in the context of erasure from ship inventories and logbooks.
Also, thank you for the context. This kind of detail tends to be extremely difficult to search for.
So an arselöschen would be a means of putting out fires with your bum bum!
I don’t think that’s how it works. Most compound words are nouns not verbs.
Also ass is “Arsch” not “Arse”. You could say Arschlöscher, but if I heard this without context I would think of something that deletes asses.
If I would need to construct a noun that describes a bum bum that extinguishes fires I would say it should be “Löscharsch” maybe even “Feuerlöscharsch”.
These are real words in the sense that German speaker should immediately understand them but you will not find them in a dictionary. That’s what makes German different from many languages. We can make up understandable compound words on the fly.
I have much to learn.
I just asked a buddy of mine what he thinks an “Arschlöscher” is without context. His answer was a bidet. It fits too perfectly.
Now I will always call bidets ass extinguishers! So thanks for extending my vocabulary.
German infamously has a lot of long compound words but for those who struggle with them I have a question (I’m curious and there’s no judgment here - I totally understand that it’s hard): Canyoureadthissentenceeventhoughtherearenospaces? What about Orangecatsittingonamat? If yes, is it difficult in German due to having a smaller vocabulary in a new language, or something else?
I think it’s funny that the capitalization of nouns in German is allegedly for readability, but at the same time we can cram the new testament into four words.
Keep in mind that the memes you see are extreme examples. The vast majority of compound words consists of 2 or 3 words. Like Ofenreiniger (oven cleaner) or Werkzeugkoffer (tool box). Werkzeug being a compound word itself, made from “Werk” & “Zeug” meaning craft or work & gadget. These extremely long words tend to describe very specific, often niche items and are just rarely used in common language. Most people would call the thing in the picture more generalised “Feuerwehrauto”. Sufficient to describe it for most people, but not as precise as the long compound. It is basically a question how much details you want or need to communicate.
Weeell I mean we use abbreviation for the really bad ones. BAföG being my usual example. And I work with international students so with some I see how they learn German from the beginning. My favourite moments are when they discover words like Arbeitsunfähigkeitsbesscheinigung (wich we abbreviate with AU or just Krankenschein), Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung (or just Tempolimit) or the aforementioned Berufsausbildungsförderungsgeld (or just BAföG). I feel like there are quite a few really long words in everyday life. You just have to look out for them.
I think the biggest difficulty when starting out is that you don’t know common endings and syllable structure, and so it can be hard to parse where the morphological boundaries lie. It’s much easier once you understand those, though you will still find instances where two components are combined in an unintuitive (for the learner) way, particularly if the translation maps to a (apparently) indivisible root in the learner’s language.
That’s like saying you can read a sentence written in rot13. Technically yes, you can decipher it, but it’s not as easy. The spaces are used for a reason. Same with punctuation.
You know that trick where people can mostly recognise words with scrambled letters, as long as the first and last are right? Long, unknown words scramble that, and force you to parse them “manually”, and even then, in your own example, you can easily misread (and then have to go back and correct yourself) cANYou…, canYOUREad…, …ceEVENTho…, …venTHOUGHT-HEREar…, …ghTHE-REARen…,
Yes that’s a good example too! (I don’t know of any language where that’s a possibility but I agree it’s similar)
The spaces are used for a reason
That’s the thing though - my hypothesis is that it’s based on what one is familiar with. There are languages/scripts where spaces don’t indicate word boundaries (e.g. Chinese), or that are rather agglutinative (e.g. Finnish), or somewhere in between (like German), or on the opposite end of the spectrum you have Hindi/Devanagari where a space and an overline marks a word. Totally understandable that it feels perhaps rot13-ish due to unfamiliarity but I would be surprised if native users of those languages share that sentiment.
I can read “help,” “groups,” and “drive” in the word, but I don’t know the others.
Hilfe – help
Leistung – action (closest translation for this context)
Löschung – extinguishing
-s- to make it sound less awkward
Gruppe – group
-n- to make it sound less awkward (Gruppen being the plural, is incidental)
fahr – root of the verb “drive” or “go” in the context of vehicles Zeug – basically “thing”; hence Fahrzeug = vehicleIt’s no coincidence that two of the words I recognized are cognates in English. “Fahr” I knew because I was always amused by the phrase “Gute Fahrt!”
EDIT: I just realized there are still remnants of “fahr” cognates in English, such as in “wayfarer.”
Yes, these compount words might be the reason why we couldn’t get rid of the damn Nazis for good: After the Second World War, we Germans ourselves probably didn’t understand what the purpose of the “Entnazifizierungsbehörde” (authority to combat National Socialist ideology) was and, accordingly, could not really grasp why it was so important. A serious mistake that still has consequences to this day, unfortunately…
/s, obviously
just separate the words
This, but seriously. If you know the words it’s trivial, and when you know a little German it’s much less confusing than it seems.
when you know a little German it’s much less confusing than it seems
speaking German is easy. Just know German!
I know it sounds silly, but my point is when you know the words, spaces are almost unnecessary.
How a normal Mexican American misunderstands via conversations with actual Germans…say you got an avocado… Now add salt, its a saltiavocado. Add vinegar, its a saltyvinegaravocado. Now step on it while running and you just “slippedonavinegaravocado” or you had an “avocadoslip”.
I call bullshit. Bullshit doesn’t come.
Meanwhile there is many words that are just two words in english instead of a compound word.
Lets take a typical example for “business” compound-words:
IT-Sicherheitsdienstleister -> IT security service provider.
I don’t know about German, but in Swedish it looks really messy if you sunder your compound words. In general I think people know what you mean regardless, but you can end up with peculiar double meanings. There are plenty of signs, notes, and what have you that people have posted online for a laugh.
Off the top of my head
- Gå lättpackad i fjällen
- Travel lightly (as in luggage) in the mountains
- Gå lätt packad i fjällen
- Travel slightly intoxicated in the mountains
- Sjukgymnast
- Physiotherapist
- Sjuk gymnast
- Diseased/Sick gymnast
- Årets sista svenskodlade tulpaner
- The last Swedish-grown tulips of the year
- Årets sista svensk odlade tulpaner
- The last Swede of the year cultivated tulips
It’s also worth noting that the tones can be different, so if you “hear” the words as you read them, then “lättpackad” and “lätt packad” sounds different.
That’s very interesting that sick/sjuk have the same slang meaning, thanks.
Yeah! I wonder if it’s because of the prevalence of English media here in Sweden. We unlike the Germans don’t really do much dubbing unless the target audience is children/families.
- Gå lättpackad i fjällen
English has large compounds like this too, we just usually add spaces and/or hyphens so it doesn’t look quite as extreme when written out.
We tend to limit it to two words most of the time, and most compound words in English are Germanic in origin.
Well yeah I didn’t think about that but that’s usually true for the roots. The crazier ones I’m thinking of are with stacked prefixes/suffixes.
Say you got a pen … Now add apple, it’s a applepen. Say you got a pen … Now add pineapple, you got pineapplepen.
That’s going to be in my head for a while. Bastard.
We were Americans driving through Europe and the late '90s.
It was before Google translate and before Google maps. I had an HP PDA with translation app on it. I had purchased language packs for the countries we were visiting.
Down the highway we go. This beautiful black and white sign appears in the side of the road. It was 10-12 ft square with a skull and crossbones. Below the skull was a VERY long word.
We laugh nervously. What the hell was that? Yeah right?
After driving for a little while another one. Fuck. I don’t know is the serious?
Another one. Now I’m breaking out the PDA and trying to remember the alphabet soup underneath the Grimm imagery. It doesn’t have any idea what I’m talking about. We’ll see another one coming up and we debate sitting in front of it until I get a chance to get it into the translator.
It was probably the longest compound word ever created to express the term drunk driving.
