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Hey, so, language is awesome, yeah? And collectively, we speak several! If you want to talk about funny or interesting things that happen in your language, or translations, stories about learning new languages or want to find people who might be happy to practice some conversation in another language, dive in here!

This is also a good place to remark on cultural differences in words or expressions etc. Basically, if it's about the way you speak where you live vs. anywhere else in the world, here's your home!

Language is super fun! I’m from Denmark and so I understand Swedish and Norwegian, as they’re all basically dialects of the same language. We are taught Englishin school at an early age and later we chose between German and French. And once you know German, you can also somewhat understand Dutch as it’s a mix of everything haha.

I’ve taken up both French, Hebrew and Welsh as an adult, but never finished any course. Not because it was hard, in fact I pick it up so fast I get bored very easily and then I move on to something else that captures my interest. I have a very short intellectual attention span, apparently.

Anyway, a fun story. Recently on the radio I heard a woman tell of some funny subtitles she had seen. I think it was on CIS or similar. Someone is running a fingerprint through a machine, there’s a result of sorts, and the guy says “Does this look like a match?� The Danish subtitles asked if it looked like a match you strike a light with. I mean seriously, how can you misunderstand that??

Dawn wrote: "... I’m from Denmark and so I understand Swedish and Norwegian, as they’re all basically dialects of the same language..."

:D This is apparent even up here in daily life, as SE/NO/DK are always grouped together on labels and packages with only occasional odd exchanged words littered in between, while the odd child FI is always banished to its own paragraph with its own gibberish words.

We could of course try hanging out more with our linguistic sibling Estonia instead, but it's great having such varied linguistic culture present :D

Also, Swedish is (still) another official language in Finland. And as such taught in schools. Which is why it's shameful how little I know to use it. Understand some, in writing, but couldn't use it, if my life depended on it.

Haha, Dawn! One of the people I studied French with used "date" like calendar date to mean "meet for a romantic evening" and it took the professor a good couple minutes to figure out what the heck was going on.

Jemina, what was the difference in the words you used for "only" in the Babel thread? Are adverbs gendered?

@Jemina Yep, quite often products that are sold all over Scandinavia has a DK/SE/NO description mashed into one, with perhaps some single words spelled in different ways (but nothing we couldn’t all figure out). We always have Finnish description as well. That’s why I knew the word for New! Was Uusi! at age 10 as it said so on the shampoo XD

Yes I know Swedish is an official language in Finland. Our production manager at work speaks Swedish and while I understand his Swedish just fine (Finnsvenska is so cute!) he doesn’t understand my Danish reply. It leads to some fun situations *g*

I actually have a Finnish friend, I’ve know her for over ten years, and she hated everything Swedish, she wouldn’t even have it spoken in her home (which is a thing we Danes do for fun). Maybe it was just that she was young, she’s mellowed a lot since then. I can understand some resistance to the influence, though, I’m just surprised at the different attitudes I’ve met among Finns.

Isn’t Finnish related to Hungarian by the way?

@Allison In Danish we have adopted the English word date, and it does have romantic connotations for us, cos that’s the context we most often hear it in on television. People going on a date, etc. Very rarely do people on tv say “What date is it?�, they’d just ask “What day is it�. I general, if on tv a date is discussed, as a specific day in a month/year, the word “dato� is used in Danish subtitles, so there is a distict difference for us between date/dato, even if it literally is the same word. We do say “It’s a date� when we want to say appointment, but it’s slightly ironic and cheeky. Otherwise we’d just rephrase it (ex: “Then that’s agreed upon�. We tend to use a lot of words, where in English there is just a single word to express a whole concept, which is why we adopt so many English words).

Allison wrote: "...Jemina, what was the difference in the words you used for "only" in the Babel thread? Are adverbs gendered? ."

"Vain" and "ainoastaan" are just two different words for "only". "Vain" is a more common form, used in adverts and casual speech for "only, "just". "Ainoastaan" derives from the word "ainoa" = "the only one", "a lone one". A more 'proper' word, probably more used in written form, but which could be used for emphasis too. Just put them both up there where they fit the translation.


But, the 'nuances' - I'd like to imagine they're the same as they would be in English in these instances. Aren't they?

Only she told him that she loved him.
Vain/Ainoastaan nainen kertoi miehelle rakastavansa ³óä²Ô³Ùä.
= only the woman, no-one else, told the man, that she loved him.

She only told him, that she loved him.
Nainen kertoi miehelle vain/ainoastaan rakastavansa ³óä²Ô³Ùä.
=the woman told the man, only that she loved him, and told him nothing else.

She told only him, that she loved him
Nainen kertoi vain/ainoastaan miehelle rakastavansa ³óä²Ô³Ùä.
=the woman told only the man, and no-one else, that she loved him.

She told him only, that she loved him.
Nainen kertoi vain/ainoastaan miehelle, jotta rakastaa ³óä²Ô³Ùä.
=the woman told only the man, that she loved him, and told no-one else.

She told him, only that she loved him.
Nainen kertoi miehelle vain/ainoastaan rakastavansa ³óä²Ô³Ùä.
=the woman told the man, only that she loved him, and told him nothing else (same as the 2nd).

She told him, that only she loved him.
Nainen kertoi miehelle, että vain/ainoastaan hän rakastaa miestä.
=the woman told the man, that she alone loves him, no-one else does.

She told him that she loved only him.
Nainen kertoi miehelle, jotta rakastaa vain/ainoastaan ³óä²Ô³Ùä.
=the woman told the man, that she loved him, and loves no-one else.

She told him that she loved him only.
Nainen kertoi miehelle, jotta rakastaa häntä ainoastaan.
=the woman told the man, that she loved him, and loves no-one else (same as above, except this is a bit more 'poetic arrangement - something you might imagine hearing in song lyrics or such).

Finnish doesn't really have anything gendered in it's grammar (which, mind, I find a treasure for not having to have to refer to people's gender all the time - or be addressed by it).

Except the ending -tar for feminine noun ending where English would use -tress. But that too often optional, and these days lesser used.

...though, perhaps one common use for that comes to mind right away is the term "rakastajatar" = feminine for "rakastaja" ("lover"), meaning of course "mistress".

I’ve noticed that my manager sometimes accidentally mixes up he and she when he speaks English and I remember my Finnish friend saying that you don’t use a gendered pronoun like that.

Dawn wrote: "@Jemina ...New! Was Uusi! at age 10 as it said so on the shampoo XD"

Aww! But yes! Goes both ways :D "Nyhed!"

Yeah. There's some division about the Swedish being taught as mandatory in schools for example. Never really got what harm that does to anyone to widen their cultural scope - we'd be pretty dang isolated here, if we just stuck with Finnish <:D

Personally, I'm damn bummed, that I didn't bother to learn the language better in school, as it is mandatory for all jobs on the sea around here! Can't get a gig on a cruise liner, if you can't speak the language of half of the passengers (Swedish is the majority language on the archipelago between here and Sweden after all - even the autonomous island of Ã…land, which still belongs to Finland's jurisdiction is Swedish speaking).

Yup, oddly enough, Finnish is related to Hungary - Finno-Ugric languages. I always imagined the same people migrated from Ural mountains and just split up to two different directions. The others came across other European cultures and settled there by their side, while we Finns/Estonians run into the icy sea <:D Who chose better? (at least we've suffered less wars and invasions?)

I've heard that about Swedish complaining how they don't understand Danish that well. Heard it said, that to them it sounds like Swedish spoken with a hot potato in mouth <:D *hah* I wouldn't know!

Dawn wrote: Isn’t Finnish related to Hungarian by the way?

Yes, they're both in the Finno-Ugric family of languages, along with Estonian.

My interest in languages in general was sparked by Tolkien originally. I've done a lot of reading on linguistics over the years, but the actual languages I am familiar with are not that many: English as a birth-tongue, French (I was a French major in college after having studied the language since fifth grade), a smattering of Quenya and Sindarin of course, and in the past few years I've started studying Biblical Hebrew. I remember in the first couple of Hebrew classes (very elementary ones, conducted informally in the summer by a fellow member of my interfaith Bible study class) I was going, "Ooh! Hebrew has a dual! Ooh! Hebrew has verb-subject-object construction. That is so cool!" My classmates all knew me well enough by this time to just laugh.

I speak a few languages. New York English, Midwestern English, Southern English and Appalachian English. :)

Jemppu wrote: "Allison wrote: "...Jemina, what was the difference in the words you used for "only" in the Babel thread? Are adverbs gendered? ."

"Vain" and "ainoastaan" are just two different words for "only". "..."

Dang, I hope my copy of Babel-17 arrives soon!

I grew up with parents speaking standard German in a tiny Bavarian town. Everyone but us (or near enough) spoke/speaks the local dialect. So I learned to "code-switch" at a young age and I've always thought about language and how it works. (And I'm pretty sure thst standard vs. dialect tension has helped me when it comes to picking up other languages.) So Babel is probably right up my alley.

Your post, Jemina, made me gaze longingly at my Finnish textbooks. One day...

One thing I've always found extra fascinating is the history of set expressions and the way in which they can differ (or not) in different languages.

Example for the first thing:
The German phrase "unter aller Kanone" (literal translation: "under/beneath all cannons"), which signifies that something isn't up to standard has nothing to do with the weapon, but comes from the Latin phrase "sub omnia canones", which is used to grade a dissertation as a fail.

Example for the second:
"In for a penny, in for a pound."
"Quand le vin est tiré, il faut le boire." ("If the wine has been poured, you have to drink it.")
"Wer A sagt, muss auch B sagen." ("If you say A, you've got to say B".)

Three languages, three very different ways to express the same idea. How fascinating is that? (There's other phrases where the differences aren't quite as stark, of course, which is even more interesting.)

I'm going to have to tell you guys all the funny language related things I can think of. Let's go!

When I was in high school, I spent one summer taking care or toddlers and babies in a park. I don't know if it's a Finnish thing, but basically parents drop their kids off in the morning, and then pick them up for lunch. It's a fenced playground outside, and there's a person taking care of the kids. The city doesn't pay them, the parents do, but it's not babysitting as such. Anyway, the regular "puistotäti" (park aunt :D) needs to have a summer vacation, and often the park is closed during that time. She asked me to fill in that summer. The pay was so high I immediately said yes. So the first day 25 kids showed up (that's the legal maximum per person), and most of them were barely walking. Obviously they all cried and wanted their mommies. I'm good with kids, so it was fine, but there was this one kid who wouldn't stop crying, so I held him and rocked him and tried to calm him down. He was from a Swedish speaking family, so I was speaking Swedish to him as much as I could. I was trying to say "Mamma kommer snart" (Mom's coming soon), but I somehow thought of the German word schnell (fast) at the same time, so I ended up barking SCHNART! at the poor baby, who proceeded to cry even harder :D He did not come back the next day.

I studied Spanish for a little while, and there was this chapter in our textbook where two people were shopping for clothes. They were looking at a blue leather jacket (yes!) and then suddenly one of them said "Tenemos un poco de prisa", and since "pris" in Swedish means price, I obviously translated this as "We'll take it no matter the cost!" I nearly died laughing when I checked what it actually meant. We still say that sometime in a "Treat yo self!" kind of way.

Around the same time my friend's sister was learning German, and she thought that "zum beispiel" meant "by bicycle".

Of course there was this time I was visiting my Swiss relatives, and Mom asked me to tell them to order a spare part for her fancy Swiss coffee maker. I understand (Swiss) German, but I can't produce sentences, just random words. None of my relatives speak any English, and my Grandma was the only one who spoke French. I couldn't have described the water tube in French either, so I was trying to come up with the German word for tube by going via English. The problem is that I wasn't thinking "tube", I was thinking "hose", so I asked my aunt's husband to order "Neue Hosen" for my Mom's coffee maker :D :D

I'm ROFLing and crying!

Oh one more! Our high school French teacher also taught Swedish, so I was especially proud of my best friend when she accidentally said "dure" (meaning hard in French), when she was trying to say to expensive ("dyr" in Swedish, pronounced almost the same way), and then managed to turn it around so that it seemed like she was always going for "dure" instead of "cher". I can't remember what we were discussing, but that split second when everyone was certain she'd made a horrible mistake, and then BOOM she fixed it like a pro.

this is a super interesting thread!

Im from Bavaria (Bavarian is badically its own language and if you move here and cant say "Oachkatzlschwoaf" =tail of a squirrel, you will be looked down on)

Also fun fact in German "helft den Armen vögeln" means "help poor people have sex" but "helft den armen Vögeln" means "help the birds" so capitalization can be key!

Ine wrote: "this is a super interesting thread!

Im from Bavaria (Bavarian is badically its own language and if you move here and cant say "Oachkatzlschwoaf" =tail of a squirrel, you will be looked down on)

A..."

It is, isn't it!?

And to make things even harder for all the non-Bavarians: there's not one unified Bavarian dialects, but regional variations as well (both in terms of vocabulary and pronunciation).
I usually feel very sorry for exchange students of German who are sent to my university and then have to contend with the dialect-speaking locals....

Oh, and don't even start thinking that Austrian and Bavarian are completely the same. Nope.
I did my undergrad in Austria and lived together with a high school friend who had no grasp of Austrian whatsoever, so I would have to translate things for her. Like, once she had found a recipe for a veggie casserole and was like: "This sounds yummy, but what on earth is Karfiol??" (Reader, "Karfiol" is "Blumenkohl"/"cauliflower".

@Anna: those stories are hilarious!

LOL Anna! I particularly like the neue Hosen one XD

Ine and Mareike, that's very interesting.

Quick question though.

How important is knowing "squirrel tail" for daily life?

@Allison:

VERY important, need this word like thrice a day!!!!

;)

nah its usually that word because its hard to pronounce for anyone unfamiliar

Some months ago, a French military officer interviewed about the armed French intervention against Islamic militants in Mali was asked if French methods were possibly too harsh. His answer in French was 'On ne fait pas dans la dentelle' (roughly translated as 'We are not in the business of lacemaking').

Also, beware of French service people (waiters, salesmen, store clerks) if you are a Québecois. The Québecois dialect (called 'joual') is basically old French mixed with English words and a lot of religious-based swear words. Anyway, one friend of mine who was in Paris and needed to buy a box cutter went to a local hardware store. There, he asked first for a 'box cutter', using the English term used by all Québecois to describe that tool. When the salesman didn't understand him, he dug in his brain and asked for the proper French name (don't ask me what it is, as I don't know it). Again, the salesman didn't understand him. In desperation, my friend went around the store, in search of a box cutter. He finally found one, and the packaging named it with both the french term he had used and with 'Box cutter'. My friend took one cutter back to the salesman to show it to him. The salesman then exclaimed 'Ahh, un Kutter!' (pronounced with a hard 'K' and hard 'u'. My friend nearly punched the salesman then.

Also, if you are a French person visiting Québec and driving a rental car, don't go ask in a garage or hardware store for a tool using its proper French name instead of the English word. What you will get most of the time is a blank stare.

LOL Ine!

Michel, that's funny. I'm always amused by the words French decides to take from English. Joual makes more sense to me--it takes whatever is most direct.

When I went to France while I was still learning French, I got a sunburn. I didn't bring anything with me for that, and for whatever reason my dictionary didn't have "sunburn" in it (and the internet wasn't really up and running yet.) So, I went into a pharmacy and did my best with the words I knew: burnt, sun, skin that turned pink etc.

At one point I said "J'ai bronzé, mais trop," which did not help.

The poor woman was so confused, and I didn't know what else to do, so I gave up and bought the burn cream she offered me.

It's coup de soleil, if anyone ever runs into a similar issue ;-)

Ine wrote: "@Allison:

VERY important, need this word like thrice a day!!!!

;)

nah its usually that word because its hard to pronounce for anyone unfamiliar"

Yes. I wonder how that came to first be used as a litmus test. I know I was first challenged to pronounce it when I was around 6 or 7 years old.

What I find really funny, however, is that a lot of Germans have trouble pronouncing the English word "squirrel". So much so that there's entire Youtube videos about it:

Anna wrote: "I'm going to have to tell you guys all the funny language related things I can think of. Let's go!

When I was in high school, I spent one summer taking care or toddlers and babies in a park. I don..."

So Google Translate just got a workout. :D

I admire polyglots, as that’s a skill I don’t have but wish I did.

Mrs. Trike is one such, being an American born and raised in Europe, so she’s fluent in Danish, French and Italian.

She went to high school in Rome and was speaking Italian with her friends (naturally; “when in Rome� has never been more literal) when she overheard some lost Americans wondering where they were. So she directed them to where they needed to go and went back to her friends. The woman thanked her and remarked, “Keep up with your English, dear, your accent is very good.� She didn’t explain to the lady her folks are from Minnesota. XD

A couple years ago she declared, “I want to learn Latin.� So she did. I’m like WTF man? She recently started speaking Spanish to her coworkers and I asked, “Where did this come from?� She goes, “Since I started watching those Mexican soap operas and reality shows on Netflix.� I said, “Didn’t you just start watching them two weeks ago?� “Yeah.� W! T! F! I mean, I watched both seasons of Narcos and all I picked up was the word “narcos�.

I am with you Trike. I am TERRIBLE at languages. I know a lot of words in English, but everything else is beyond me.

However, English is fascinating on it's own. One of my favorite things is synonyms and connotation.

Booty Call is very different from Butt Dial.

A cottage in the forest sounds cozy, but a cabin in the woods can be terrifying.

My favorite is "Forgive me Father for I have sinned" vs "I'm Sorry Daddy, I've been bad."

I imagine if you are not a native English speaker, that could get really tricky.

I was also thoroughly amused a few weeks ago when I was looking up something about David Tennant and I saw a bunch of articles about "Former Physician Who actor, David Tennant." I'm going to assume those were translated. :)

Trike wrote: "Anna wrote: "I'm going to have to tell you guys all the funny language related things I can think of. Let's go!

When I was in high school, I spent one summer taking care or toddlers and babies in ..."

If she already speaks Italian AND knows Latin, picking up Spanish probably isn't too hard. I definitely fell back on my knowledge of Spanish and Latin when I started learning French.
But two weeks is still a very short time span!

@Kristin: Ha! Those are classics. You'd definitely need to have the cultural context to figure those out. (I actually had to explain what a "booty call" is to a friend recently. She did think it was synonymous with "butt dial". Hilarity ensued.)

Kristin B. wrote: "However, English is fascinating on it's own. One of my favorite things is synonyms and connotation.

Booty Call is very different from Butt Dial.

A cottage in the forest sounds cozy, but a cabin in the woods can be terrifying."

This pretty much sums it up:

lol. That was perfect, Trike!

I never fully appreciated how ridiculous English was until I had to teach my kid to read. You try telling a six year old why knee has a k in it and enough has a g and an h. So confusing.

Kristin B. wrote: "I was also thoroughly amused a few weeks ago when I was looking up something about David Tennant and I saw a bunch of articles about "Former Physician Who actor, David Tennant." I'm going to assume those were translated. :) ..."

Maybe not. He's Scots.

[badda-bing!]

Trike wrote: "I speak a few languages. New York English, Midwestern English, Southern English and Appalachian English. :)"

More simply put: We're American. We speak English. (Though a certain other nation has serious doubts about that.)

And in college I flunked first semester German.


.........twice.

Kristin B. wrote: "I never fully appreciated how ridiculous English was until I had to teach my kid to read. You try telling a six year old why knee has a k in it and enough has a g and an h."

It's almost always in the word origin or in the evolution of word pronunciation.

So when a kid asks why to that kind of question you just go, "Hey, what do I look like, a professor? I'm just this guy, you know? You want to know 'why' so bad, grow up to become a philologist, kid. Then you tell me!"

... probably a good thing I never had kids.

Micah wrote: "So when a kid asks why to that kind of question you just go, "Hey, what do I look like, a professor? I'm just this guy, you know? You want to know 'why' so bad, grow up to become a philologist, kid. Then you tell me!"

... probably a good thing I never had kids. '..."

Works for me. I say stuff like this to my kid all the time. If he asks me a question about why things react the way they do, I tell him I'm not a chemist. If he asks why planets act a certain way I tell him I'm not an astrophysicist. So now, when he asks about language I can say I'm not a philologist. If I can pronounce it that is. ;) Maybe I'll stick with the word "linguist."

The opposite issue, a friend of the family got a call from their kids' school saying their children were completely unruly, nonverbal and unready for school. Their kids are pretty well behaved, so they went to have a meeting about it.

Well, the dad used to be in Intelligence--he spoke 6 or 7 languages. While stationed abroad, he met and married a woman with whom he shared 2-3 languages, and who also spoke 6 or 7 languages.

And because they were used to talking back and forth in whatever language was convenient at the time, their kids learned a total of about 11 languages that they spoke as it suited them at home.

So the poor teacher thought these kids were speaking in tongues, when really they were just speaking their home pidgin. It did take some work for the parents to convince their children that people could have whole conversations in just one language.

Allison wrote: "The opposite issue, a friend of the family got a call from their kids' school saying their children were completely unruly, nonverbal and unready for school. Their kids are pretty well behaved, so ..."

Oh boy....

Kristin B. wrote: "lol. That was perfect, Trike!

I never fully appreciated how ridiculous English was until I had to teach my kid to read. You try telling a six year old why knee has a k in it and enough has a g and..."

Someone should make a gnat’s knee mnemonic.

Another lesson:

If you give a man a ghoti, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to ghoti, he eats for a lifetime. (view spoiler)[Ghoti - use the gh from laugh, the o from women, and the ti from rational. (hide spoiler)]

Allison wrote: "The opposite issue, a friend of the family got a call from their kids' school saying their children were completely unruly, nonverbal and unready for school. Their kids are pretty well behaved, so ..."

That's awesome & funny that they didn't run into that issue before school happened.

Allison wrote: "The opposite issue, a friend of the family got a call from their kids' school saying their children were completely unruly, nonverbal and unready for school. Their kids are pretty well behaved, so ..."

#UnintendedConsequences

When my cousin married a guy from Germany, to teach their son both languages she would ask the kid, using English, to tell his dad something, but his dad would only speak German. Then dad would tell son something in German and have him relay that to mom, but mom only spoke English. So the kid learned as a toddler to translate between German and English very quickly.

Of course, both of my cousins spoke both languages, and one day she said something to him in German. The kid looked appalled and covered his mom’s mouth with his tiny hand and insisted, “You don’t say that!�

°¿´Ç±è²õ.😂

One day I was in a store and two Asian women, I assume mother and daughter, were walking by. They stopped and the mom gave this long, impassioned rant in Korean or Chinese or whatever, and the daughter responded, “Hell no!� Mom shrugged and they went on their way.

Dual language dad joke:

French guy (showing me his yachts): This is Un. This is Deux. This is Trois. This is Quatre. This is Six.

Me: Where's the 5th?

FG: Cinq.
9:46 AM · Jan 7, 2016

Decades ago, there was this popular American TV cartoon series, THE FLINSTONES, that I really liked. They then did a French version of it, using a Québec dubbing company. The result was perfect, very funny, with the Québec 'Joual' matching well with the spirit of the cartoon. Then, when it played out in France, the people there complained that they couldn't understand it, so they produced a new version in Parisian French. It was horrible, full of English words used for pedantic reasons, the way only Parisians could do!

I just found a very interesting article about Scots on Atlas Obscura. It's not just about Scots, it's about language colonization. Here's the link:

After reading this article, I wonder if English is really a dialect of Scots.

Speaking of Québecois dialect ... Has anyone seen the show Au service de la France (strangely translated into English as A Very Secret Service) now on Netflix?

In the second season there's a delegation from a Québec separatist group that comes to France to seek help organizing their liberation from Canada. Hilarious scene. The French agents sit there and talk in front of the Québec delegation saying things like, "This is amazing. It's like they're speaking a foreign language that we can't understand a word of, yet they understand everything we say!"

Yup! That sounds about right!

This was brought up elsewhere, and I'm bumping this thread so the conversation stays on topic there.

This is critical, friends. We're talking meals.

What are the bread products where you live? What's a biscuit? A scone? A cookie?

And what do you have for breakfast normally?

On the top of my head: . No word for it other than perhaps "sweet bread". But it's really not considered 'bread' here.

or 'crisp bread'.

.

And although not a bread but cheese, it has the word in the name: or "bread cheese" (not to be confused with "juustoleipä", which would be just any "cheese sandwich").

...yet, what do I really know: I don't even eat bread (so, of these, only the last one would fit into my breakfast).

I’m from the USA, so a cookie is a cookie. No I mean a cookie is a sweet dough, flat, crispy or doughy. A biscuit is a basically savory quick bread (leavened with baking powder). A scone is more sweet than savory, but very similar in texture to a biscuit.

I’ve lived all over Europe, so I’m familiar with the biscuit/cookie quandary.

For me, A pancake is a sweet, light and fluffy quick bread you fry on a griddle or in a pan. It’s about the size of a saucer but can be as big as a dinner plate. It is about 1cm or 1/2 inch thick. But in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands they are more like crepes.

Yes, Diane describes what I know from living in different places of the US. Of course, pancakes have lots of regional names, and perhaps slight differences, too: griddle cake, flapjack, journey cake, johnny cake....

Normally I have leftovers for breakfast, or plain (whole milk Greek-style) yogurt and a handful of nuts. When on a vacation I usually treat myself to an omelet full of veggies and cheese with a fruit cup. And one cup of coffee.

My husband has a hard-boiled egg, a small glass of orange juice, a couple of cups of coffee, and muffins or oatmeal cookies if they're around. Sometimes toast. On vacation he gets steak & eggs with toast & hashbrowns.

My college son almost always has cereal and milk, preferably something a little sweet; Cheerios are ok but flavored variations are better, and a glass of chocolate milk (made with a quick stir-in of mix [like Nestle's but we boycott them]).

Diane wrote: "For me, A pancake is a sweet, light and fluffy quick bread you fry on a griddle or in a pan. It’s about the size of a saucer but can be as big as a dinner plate. It is about 1cm or 1/2 inch thick. But in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands they are more like crepes."

In Finland these are two different things (or methods of preparation): pancake a pancake ("pannukakku"), the thing you pour in a pan and stick in an oven to bake and rise. And "lätty"/"lettu"/"ohukainen"/"räiskäle" is the thin crêpe-y thing you toss on a frying pan.

I've never heard of putting a pancake in the oven.
In a cast iron skillet?
Sounds kind of like a "Dutch Baby" which has been trending in the US lately.

To continue Jemppu's post, in Finland crepes are only called crepes if they're filled, savoury ones. And the American style pancakes are called American pancakes :)

Just like American football :P Any time the Americans get a word wrong, we just add 'American' in front to help clear things up :D

Cheryl wrote: "I've never heard of putting a pancake in the oven.
In a cast iron skillet?
Sounds kind of like a "Dutch Baby" which has been trending in the US lately."

In a baking pan or tray. But yeah, seems similar to "Dutch Baby".

copied from other thread:

us Texicans eat biscuits for breakfast as do most southerners. And they're often served with gravy on them. What you're referring to we call cookies.

biscuit = a small quick bread made from dough that has been rolled out and cut or dropped from a spoon = similar to scones

cookie = a small sweet cake, typically round, flat, and crisp. Oreo and Shortbread and Chocolate Chip = types of cookies

ETA: in the US most biscuits, like scones) are cut out of a rolled dough and are not dropped

also copied from other thread:

lots of names in the US for those including thongs (but those are also a skimpy kindle of women's underpants) and Zorries (what my mother used).

I like biscuits of both kinds including Maryland Beaten Biscuits which really are beaten (usually with an axe handle) for about 30 minutes. They're pretty dense.

I'm sure there are even words used in the UK that aren't the same word in Australia. I remember getting into an argument with an Australian on a forum where I was insisting pancakes were always leavened and were light and fluffy and she kept saying they were thin and flat and more like crepes.