That’s a latin phrase that’s heavily used in Italian as well in regard to death. It’s not something they’d be ignorant about.
As a foreigner in The Netherlands (were, unlike say in the US, there really isn’t any expectation that foreigners have good knowledge of the language) I would often play the “I’m just an ignorant foreigner” card and purposefully misinterpret an expression for humouristic purposes.
So what I’m saying there is that maybe one of the sides of this story genuinelly believed it: when you’re the one playing the “ignorant foreigner” game, it’s the native speaker’s shocked reaction that makes it funny.
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 :(
I just thought they got the word for gay from humidity
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?
OP never played Assassin’s Creed 2
(The OP from the texts, not OP on lemmy)
It’s a phrase in swedish as well so i’d frankly assume any language that has been touched by the slimy tentacle of latin has it.
It’s way easier for people who don’t speak a Romance language to tell when a Latin thing is widespread though. I imagine Italian has a lot more of latin phrasery hanging around.
I speak German as a second language, and at one point, I wanted to say “time flies,” but I didn’t know if you’d say “the time flies,” so I went with “tempus fugit.” I immediately got a flash of understanding of all the people I’ve met who used eloquent and academic phrasing interspersed with spotty control of the language we’re speaking. I tend to use a Latin derived word for any missing vocabulary I need, but that always sounds clunky af.
I can tell you it does not have the death connotation at all in Portuguese, which is also a latin language.
In fact in Portuguese “rest in peace” would be an absolutelly normal thing to say if for example somebody had mentioned their neighbhours are noisy and they were going for a rest (though a more general wishing for a good rest to others, would be something that translates to “rest well” rather than “rest in peace” and specifically for people going to sleep it would be “sleep well”).
This is maybe because the word by word translation of “in peace” in Portuguese has a double meaning, of both “in peace” and “peacefully” depending on context, since the language has no specific word for “peacefully”, so people might say what is word by word “rest in peace” whilst meaning “rest peacefully”.
It would thus be understandable for a native portuguese speaker whose domain of the english language is still at a mid level (were they tend to translate things word by word) to in the right context (to somebody who has complained that his or her rest or sleep tends to be disturbed by outside factors) to wish somebody going to sleep using the English language words “rest in peace”, totally oblivious to how his or her word by word translation from the Portuguese carries a whole different meaning in English.
It’s kind of the same in Italian tbh. Granted, I would probably never say “riposa/dormi in pace” without context as a “goodnight”, but the example you made (noisy neighbors) or maybe the fact that the friend didn’t want to go out due to being tired can lead to the use of that expression. It is still fairly uncommon, but possible (whether or not the post is fake or not).
I once told my friends I’ll be back in a bit, I have to put my kids to sleep. They told me that sounds ominous af.
I loved hassling my friend when he’d say he’d “be on after he puts [daughter] down”
Brother, please don’t euthanize your child.
At my school a parent of a particularly bad student once told teachers after the exams that his son “passed away”.
Reminds me of “it doesn’t matter” in my second language English class. We all said together as a class “it’s not grave” when asked what we thought “ce n’est pas grave” was in English.
The worst part is that technically isn’t incorrect in English. Conversationally, most people might take a second, but grave does also mean serious
Absolutely if someone said “it’s not grave” to me I would understand it to mean “it’s not serious” or “it’s not very important”
Man, language is wild. If I heard “It’s not grave”, after assuming English as a second language, I’d immediately jump to assuming something like “it’s not vital” complete with emphasis. Similar to saying “nobody will die if this isn’t done, but we’d all really rather it was done” as the subtext.
In German “it doesn’t matter” means “es ist egal” (literally something like “it is equal” but “egal” is only used in this sense). When I played a board game with a Spanish native speaker, I asked “how many points do you have?” And he said “es ist egal”, intending to say “we are equal” but I was like “it sure does matter” and he thought I didn’t believe him that he reached me.
Someone I know who is learning English just told me yesterday after a difficult task that he’s on his last few cell brains. He meant brain cells. The order in which words are spoken are often reversed from Spanish to English and the results from a new speaker are often quite humorous.
Learning a new language is a humbling experience for sure, lol. You just have to roll with these kinds of mistakes and learn to find the humor in them.
When I was starting to learn dutch I commonly said the dutch word for “doctor” when I meant a medical doctor, because in every other language I knew at the time (my mother tongue and 2 other languages I learned at school) you could use the same word for both “medical doctor” and “somebody with a doctorate” (though in English you can also use “physician”).
Dutch does NOT use the same word for both and in fact it’s quite different (“arts” for the medical one, “doktor” for the other one), which was a really hard one to adjust to because of just how uniquelly so (within my experience) that was.
When you trip on something like that again and again you definitely just have to roll with it and mentally go “Oops, I did it again” ;)