Spyke
feddit.org

What's next, rivals called Vladimir and Volodymyr? Get real.

59

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

18
lemmy.world

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

10
Dicskareply
lemmy.world

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

6
feddit.org

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.

6
lemmy.world

Hamburger is someone from the city of Hamburg

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

7

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.

3
ByteJunkreply
lemmy.world

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

1

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.

2

Sort of yes, but the origins of old surnames are always uncertain

5

I remember when I first realised this in Japanese class and I had to look it up to see if it was deliberate

4

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.

3

You reached the end