Comment on I know the Second World War arc was popular, but let's face it, the writers got lazy

• SpongyAneurysm@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.

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  • ByteJunk@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

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

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    • SpongyAneurysm@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.

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  • SethTaylor@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Hamburger is someone from the city of Hamburg

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

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    • SpongyAneurysm@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.

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• lauha@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

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

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