Conversions seems freely interpreted. In Gujarati it's `હોવેરક્રાફ્ટ`, transliterates to `hovercraft`, no meaning. In Malayalam `പറക്കും-പേടകം` translates to `Flying-vehicle`. In Hindi `ṃḍarāne vālī nāv` translates to `Floating boat`. In Marathi `माझी होडी मासळयांनी भरली आहे` it just says, `My boat is full of fish`.
But that might be very Anglocentric way of translating things. For example in Polish, hovercraft is "poduszkowiec", meaning "pillower", because it has an air pillow underneath it :)
The original Dutch word is "luchtkussenboot" (air pillow boat), but almost exclusively used in Flanders (Belgium) and the southwest of the Netherlands as the English loanword "Hovercraft" is more commonly used.
So the pillow thing is more common than you think.
Same goes for Norwegian - 'Luftputebåt' - 'luft' 'pute' båt' - 'air' 'pillow' 'boat'.
Hovercraft is occasionally used, but many (most?) Norwegians would frown at this in a Norwegian-language text, as luftputebåt does the job perfectly well, thankyouverymuch.
Then again, it is a word which is seldomly used as hovercraft are exceedingly rare around here - AFAIK there has been only one commercial service (incidentally, from the island I currently live on to the nearby town of Ålesund and some surrounding places) - it operated for a few months in 1965, being terminated after the craft capsized for the second time in as many months - more or less.
I can confirm that this is true for Danish too except it is 'luftpudebåd', not 'luftputebåt'. Yes, Danish and Norwegian are very similar.
So luftpudebåd is the proper Danish word and hovercraft is the anglicism that is creeping into our language.
However, I tried to search for both words on Google limiting the results to the Danish top-level domain and apparently there are three times as many results for hovercraft. This may not be the best statistic for linguistics but it's all I have.
I also looked up both words in a Danish encyclopedia (http://denstoredanske.dk). There is no article for 'luftpudebåd' and the article for 'hovercraft' has no mention of the word 'luftpudebåd'.
So perhaps I'm stuck in the past when I claim that the proper Danish word is luftpudebåd...
> but many (most?) Norwegians would frown at this in a Norwegian-language text
That's funny - I think most Dutch people would burst out laughing if they were to encounter 'luchtkussenboot' in a Dutch text. The correct translation of 'hovercraft' into Dutch is 'hovercraft' (at least in my area).
-I've no good reason why, though - in general, we embrace any anglicism we can get our hands on; this includes the mass media.
I've never seen 'hovercraft' used in any of them, though - I guess the reason may be simply that the word -luftputebåt- was introduced in the mid-sixties, prior to anglicisms being in vogue - and then fell out of use just as quickly as hovercraft never caught on here.
Hence, on the few occasions when we need the word, the first that pops into our minds is the Norwegian one.
Just a guess, though. I am by no means a linguist.
"Luftkissenboot" is "air pillow boat". I think those who say "Luftkissenfahrzeug" ("air pillow vehicle") might also be those who say "Fernsprechhandapparat" ("long distance speech hand(held) device") instead of "Hörer" ("(phone) handset").
:-)
But my favorite is "Personenvereinzelungsanlage" (people turn-into-singles device, aka turnstile). It describes very clearly what it does, but not how it does it. Whereas turnstile is silent regarding whether it works or not.
The German and (ironically?) Hungarian translations both use "air-pillow" for the hovering part, though in German they translated it as "vehicle" and in Hungarian as "boat." Go figure.
[edit] "air-pillow" is presumably meant to be read as "air-cushioned" but in both cases the actual word was "pillow"
"Kissen" (German for "pillow") and "cushion" have the same origin. The old french word "cuissin", meaning "cushion for the hip" (comes from "coxa" which is "hip" in Latin).
"Pillow" apparently comes from the old Germanic word "pyle" or "pylu" which is based on the Latin word "pulvinus" (meaning "cushion").
If you look at the other Germanic languages, most use either "vehicle" or "boat".
As a native speaker born far away from any body of water, I would have said that you could use "Luftkissenboot" and "Luftkissenfahrzeug" interchangeably but the German Wikipedia article disagrees. "Vehicle" apparently implies that it doesn't only need to work on water.
Your remark somehow caused me to fall down an internet rabbit hole.
First I remembered reading a story on the internet that in Bislama, one of the official languages of the island nation of Vanuatu, the word for Helicopter is "mixmaster blong Jesus Christ". The explanation being that blades of a helicopter are like a blender, and Jesus Christ went to heaven, so "the blender that rises up to heaven".
Then, before replying with that, I wondered if there actually was any proper source for that. Now, the official bislama.org website translates helicopter to "helikopta", so we already know that this is not true[0]. Also, surely a quirk like this would be mentioned on the Wikipedia page for the language, and it is not[1]. So where did the story come from?
The only primary source that I have found for this claim is a story from the 1980s by Richard Shears, a journalist for the London Daily Mail[2].
> “Consequently, some people spoke French, other English. The original inhabitants adopted Bislama, a type of pidgin English. They also used a picture language that seemed to combine a bit of English and pidgin, resulting in a brassiere being described as “basket blong titty”. A toothbrush was “broom blong tut” (brush belonging to tooth), a helicopter was “Mixmaster blong Jesus Christ”.
Technically, it might be the case that this was a Bislama way of describing a helicopter forty years ago. But until we get some native speakers to confirm or deny this, it sounds a bit unlikely. While this is not really evidence, the writing style also makes it sound more like made up a "haha look at the primitive natives"-story.
First we get the "basket blong titty" example. Because natives don't wear bras of course, they're nudes, so they don't have a word for it. But they have baskets, and a brassiere is something to hold breasts. Hence, basket blong titty. Ha. ha. (note how of all examples they could have chosen, they zoomed in on one that involves the word "titty"). Similarly: "haha, they do not make a distinction between brooms and brushes because they are simple, so they call a toothbrush a "broom blong tut". Note: bismata.org translates "broom" as "brum", and "toothbrush" as "tutbras". Brassiere is not in their on-line dictionary yet.
And then, once you follow that logic and accept that those two things might be true, 'mixmaster blong Jesus Christ' seems both outlandish and believable at once because it is both funny and conveniently fits preconceived notions of simple, primitive island natives.
But why would the Vanatu people know what a blender is, but instead of saying blender make up a simple word "mixmaster"? Why would the first association be a blender, but not a boat propeller, which seems a lot more likely for an island nation? Why would they know about the story of Jesus Christ and his ascension, and make that the first association?
I forwarded this little investigation to Snopes with the request to get to the bottom of this and either fully debunk it or, in the unlikely case that it is/was true, confirm it.
> But why would the Vanatu people know what a blender is, but instead of saying blender make up a simple word "mixmaster"?
It's a brand name. Like "hoover" for "vacuum cleaner".
> Why would they know about the story of Jesus Christ and his ascension
Missionaries?
But yes, the story seems dubious. I've read a similar claim that in Tok Pisin (closely related to Bislama),"eclipse" is or was rendered as "kerosin lamp belong Yesus Kraist he bugarup stop finish altagetha".* As the Tok Pisin word for "sun" is simply "san", this seems even less likely.
* Typing from memory, so spelling and grammar are likely inaccurate.
