The things that languages do to each other
This entry was inspired by me casually glancing at a Francis Fukuyama book. It's not about the particular book ("The Great Disruption"), but rather about Francis, or to be more specific, about "Fukuyama."
For some unfathomable reason, Japanese -- a non Hindu European language -- which should have nothing to do with any other Hindu European language, has too many perfectly innocent Japanese words that when pronounced in Russian are some type of mixture of the bizarre and the obscene. A few samples follow:
* Fukuyama: Yuk, a pit!
* Zaibatsu: To fornicate to state of physical and mental abandon / to become to haughty
* Nagasaki: Genitalia's leg
Every session of my Modern Japanese history course in undergrad provided me with personal hilarity. Of the polyglots reading this, are there any other examples of this type of occurrence?
7:16:37 AM 
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