So today I want to share something I accidentally ran across the other day when I was looking up something in a German-English dictionary.

Before I explain that, though, I should first point out that on menus around here many salads and sandwiches are listed as coming with Gurken. Now, that German word sounds a lot like the word for those little baby pickles in North America, “gherkin”, so you might think that Gurken means “pickle.” However, the food product called Gurken in German is not the same food as a “gherkin”. Rather, a “gherkin” in North America refers to a picked cucumber, while Gurke, plural form Gurken, in German just means a regular cucumber.

If you want to refer to a “picked cucumber” in German, you say Essiggurke, Essig being the word for vinegar.

Now in North American, pickle slices often get put on a sandwich, but you rarely see slices of raw cucumber added to a random sandwich. Here in Tübingen, though, while you never see slices of Essiggurken on a sandwich, you almost always get slices of Gurken — raw cucumber — on all kinds of sandwiches, burgers, etc.  So if you see that something come with Gurken, you need to remember that it means it comes with raw cucumber, not pickles.

So, to review:

Gurke = the German word for cucumber
Essig  = the German word for vinegar
Essiggurke  = the German word for pickled cucumber
“gherkin” = the English word for a type pickled cucumber

So, a Gurken isn’t a gherkin, but the fact that the two words are so similar in pronunciation actually helped me to remember the word for cucumber in German.  When I would be at the farmer’s market after I started learning German, and there were no signs on the produce to remind me of the vocabulary I needed to say, I remembered that a cucumber was like a pickle, and that gave me the German word.

See, sometimes the similarity between your native language and your target language can be helpful.

But not always. Which gets me back to what I noticed in the dictionary the other day. While looking for something else entirely in the German-English dictionary on my iPad, I ran across an entry for a German word that I had not run across before,  Pickel.  The pronunciation of this German word is just like the English word “pickle”.

However, in case the reader of the entry had somehow overlooked noticing what the real translation of the word should be, there was also a special note at the end of that entry, written in larger text and contained within a shaded box to draw attention to it. The warning reads:

LANGUAGE NOTE:

Be careful! Pickel is not translated by the English word “pickle”

Nope, it’s not. It’s not even close, which I guess is why they thought to put the warning in the entry.  Pickel in German means … “pimple” in English.

Sometimes those words in a foreign language that sound like words in your native language turn out not to be your friends after all… 😉