• PugJesus@piefed.socialOPM
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      23 days ago

      “Hitler acquires resources from the masses, while I engage in high-level paranormal summoning of ancient Aryan ghosts to revive GLORIOUS THULE” - Himmler, probably

  • lauha@lemmy.world
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    23 days ago

    -er suffix is just a German surname convention meaning a person from that place, like new yorker in english

    • Dicska@lemmy.world
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      23 days ago

      Wait, does it mean Himmler could mean something like ‘the one from heaven’?

      • SpongyAneurysm@feddit.org
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        23 days ago

        Nah. Not necessarily. The -er CAN be that, but it can be many other things.

        Hamburg is the city, Hamburger is someone from the city of Hamburg. Easy-peasy.

        But it’s also used for other things. A Fischer is not someone coming from Fisch, but someone who’s profession (or hobby) is fishing. And that’s also a common last name. So -er is more like a suffix to transform some $WORD to mean ‘person, that has some kind of relation to $WORD’.

        So it’s pretty common for last names to end that way, and it’s not always easily discernible what the relation to $WORD actually as, or sometimes not even known anymore what $WORD means. I wouldn’t have assigned any meaning to my own last name, for example, if I hadn’t researched it at some point (and it’s still unclear).

        I’m not a language expert, just native speaker, so this is not an exhaustive explanation of the concept. I just wanted to point out, that it’s more complicated.

        • Seth Taylor@lemmy.world
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          23 days ago

          Hamburger is someone from the city of Hamburg

          [ slowly puts half-eaten hamburger down in stunned horror ]

          • SpongyAneurysm@feddit.org
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            22 days ago

            I deliberately chose that example for the shits and giggles.

            But now that I think of it, I guess I should explain some more. It doesn’t have to be a person to work that way.

            Usually it works like this: you have place names like: Wien (Vienna)
            Frankfurt
            Nürnberg (Nuremberg)
            Thüringen (Thuringia)
            Krakau (Krakow)

            by making them end in -er you can turn them into adjectives. (Keeping the capitalization, because they are names, although adjectives are usually lower-case):

            Frankfurter Würstchen
            Wiener Würstchen
            Nürnberger Würstchen
            Thüringer Würstchen
            Krakauer Wurst

            Those are all some kind of sausages (Wurst, pl. Würste, diminutive: Würstchen), by the way. And because they are well recognized and when the context is clearly about food, you can drop the noun entirely and the former adjective turns into a Noun, which can stand on its own. (But mostly distinguished by their article/genus)

            Frankfurter
            Wiener
            Nürnberger
            Thüringer
            Krakauer

            Though for some reason, “Pariser” is a slang word for condoms.

        • ByteJunk@lemmy.world
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          23 days ago

          I sense a tragic past with PHP. Or maybe Perl? Maybe even a little too fond of bash scripting?

          • SpongyAneurysm@feddit.org
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            22 days ago

            It’s the bash-influence.

            I wouldn’t say I’m too fond of it. I don’t really write scripts much, but that way of calling a variable makes it easy to see, that it is a variable. So I thought it was fitting to abuse it here.

            And a lot of Lemmy users seem to be somewhat familiar with Linux.

  • Pommes_für_dein_Balg@feddit.org
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    22 days ago

    Fun fact: Hitler’s father was called Schicklgruber until he changed his name under strange circumstances at age 40.
    “Heil Schicklgruber” would have definitely been less catchy.