Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Word on Wednesday: Lauf(-) und Leckerei

As an addition to my blog, which so far receives posts at fairly irregular intervals, I'm starting a regular feature of a Word on Wednesday. The intent through this is to create educational posts based on a relevant word (or at least one with personal relevance). In the future, these will be English words and may come from anything I've found interesting. Although today's post is mostly for my readers who do not understand German, it will also serve as a light introduction to the Word on Wednesday posts by explaining all 3 words that make up the title of this blog: Lauf(-) und Leckerei.
To be honest, when I was trying to come up with a title for this blog, my initial thoughts involved using my name and playing around with alliteration - because that's catchy, right? For some reason, this just worked a little easier in German, capturing the main topics I'd been thinking of writing about and someday I'll get around to writing more about the German language and culture as I've experienced it, making a title in the language fitting as well.

To put it simply, I could probably just translate my chosen title as: 


which apparently still gives me a bit of the alliteration I was looking for anyways. However, I do quite enjoy the simplicity of combining words where parts of the word (suffixes) are shared, as is often done in the German language. In this case, Lauf is a noun meaning run and when combined with -erei from Leckerei, it turns into Lauferei which is to mean legwork, running about or the run around.

Do you know if you can hyphenate words in other languages like this?



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