17/03/2022
🍀
So Purim and St. Patrick's Day coincide this year (as it did nineteen years prior when I was in middle school. Funnily enough my jack-of-all-trades secular studies teacher at my Jewish school, Mr. Daniel Greene, was himself Irish Catholic and did make the “yay! Irish and Jews can be drunk together on the same day!” remark. That said, I think I'll opt for something a little bit more tasteful given that I've been to many places, the Republic of Ireland among them, that are quite sensitive to alcoholism stereotypes usually foisted on them by their former overlords / colonizers).
🇺🇲
The English phrase “have fun!” has two pieces. The verb “to have” is fairly common throughout the Germanic languages in some form or another. We have “haben” in German, “hobn” in Yiddish, “at have” in Danish, “att ha” in Swedish, “å ha” in Norwegian, among others. Now “fun” is of North Germanic origin, and among its relatives is (yes, it shocked me to) the Swedish word “fån”, meaning “dolt” or “oaf”. Den här fånen insåg inte att han skulle vara barnvakt åt dig. This oaf didn't realize that he was supposed to babysit you (lit. This here the oaf insaw not that he should be childwatch to thee).
🇸🇪
Now in Swedish, we also use “att ha” to indicate to have fun, but “ha roligt!” is the command form. You can also say “ha det roligt!” (lit. have it fun). The word “rolig” means fun or funny in Swedish, and the -t at the end indicates either an adverb or the neuter-gender singular form. (Dont worry, Scandinavians, we're gonna get to that joke in a moment). Now the word “rolig” in Danish and Norwegian actually means “calm” , in Danish you will very often hear “bare rolig!” (lit. just calm) as an interjection. There is a joke in Scandinavia that tells the story of a Swedish tourist in Denmark or Norway who says to the cab driver “take me to a fun place”. The cab driver takes him to the cemetery. And now you get the joke.
🇩🇰
Now if Danish and Norwegian don't use “rolig” to refer to fun, what DO they use? (Oh, by the way, “Ruhe” [rest, peace, calm] in German is indeed a relative of “rolig”. Some of you may have been to Karlsruhe in Germany, literally “Karl's Rest”, or “the place where Karl relaxes”). So Danish can use “at have det sjovt” (to have it fun), and the command form is just “ha det sjovt” (you can use this to one person or mutiple people. Then there is also the significantly more formal “god fornøjelse!” (lit. good enjoyment / satisfaction / pleasure). And as for...
🇸🇯..Norwegian, there is “å kose seg” meaning “to have fun”, which conjugates like any other reflexive verb in Norwegian. Like Swedish and Danish, there are also expressions that literally mean “have it X”, where X is an adverb. Ha det moro! (Have it fun). Ha det morsomt! (Have it fun/funny) Ha det gøy! (Have it fun!) That last word gøy is, yes, a relative of the English word ”gay”. The word does not refer to homosexuals in Norwegian, that's a story for another time that deserves its own entry.
🇩🇪🇦🇹🇨🇭
To wish someone “have fun” in German, use “viel Spaß!” (lit. much fun).
🕎
Now unlike German but like its more distant Scandinavian relatives, Yiddish actually uses a verb with the verb “to have”. Unlike any of these languages, however, a Hebrew-origin word can be used. I say “can” because there are multiple expressions (well, this is the case in all of the languages on this list, but I'm on a time limit, k?) There is “האב הנאה" (hob hanoe!) which you say to one person informally, lit. “have enjoyment”. You can use “האט הנאה" (hot hanoe!) to say it to a group of people or one person informally (with the “ir” form that Yiddish uses for both purposes). Then there is also a phrase I have heard more infrequently, namely “מאך א לעבן" (makh a lebm”), literally “make a life”, which in turn ended up in...
🇮🇱..Modern Hebrew in the form of a calque. So if you are a seasoned polyglot or linguistic (or have been following me for a while), you probably know what a calque is. For those who need a reminder, it is a literal translation. Israeli Hebrew is full of these from other languages, among them English, Slavic languages, French and Yiddish. To give another example. In French, you literally call a potato an apple of the earth. Potatoes aren't in the Hebrew Bible, so to make a Hebrew word for potato, they translate apple, they translate earth, and end up with “תפוח אדמה" (tapuakh adama). French structure, not a word of French to be found. Given that in the early decades of the state of Israel, Yiddish was seen as an exilic language to be shunned, but still many immigrants had knowledge of it, many of these phrases found their way into Hebrew in the form of calques. Oddly enough, many ancient Hebrew Yiddish phrases found their way into Yiddish, which in turn found homes in modern Hebrew because of their popularity in Yiddish (and other Hebrew-origin words in Yiddish that had their meaning completely warped when they were introduced from ancient Hebrew into Yiddish). There are many ways in Hebrew to express the concept of having fun even without getting into the tangle that is the “binyanim” (lit. “buildings”, story for another time), but I'll leave you with “תעשה חיים!” (ta'aseh khayim!”, which also means “make a life!” (Hebrew has no indefinite articles [e.g. a/an]).
🇭🇺
Hungarian can use two phrases off the top of my head:“Érezd jól magad!” - lit. feel good (lit. feel [command] well yourself). “Maga” refers to self in Hungarian and is used in reflexive verbs much like the English word “oneself” and its ilk. It is also used in other contexts to refer to “you” when you want to be be mean / condescending / talk down to someone. This is a fairly recent development, because when my own ancestors first migrated from Budapest to America, they themselves would have used “maga” as an honorable term. Then there is also “Jó szórakozást!” (lit. good entertainment). The -t at the end of the second word is the accusative case, which is frequently done with Hungarian expressions (including the ones that people learn literally as their first phrases as beginners) because you are wishing something. The something you are wishing is in the accusative case. In phrases like these there is a usually unsaid “kívánok” (I wish), so the full meaning is “I wish good entertainment”.
🇫🇮
Let's Finnish this off: there is “pidä hauskaa” (the verb pitää in Finnish has a dizzying amount of meanings, especially idiomatically, so for the sake of convenience I am going to tell you that it literally means ”to hold”). Hauska is fun or funny (likely a calque of “rolig” from Swedish, actually! Remember “calques”? Remember “rolig?) And remember, from a week and a half ago...the partitive case? The “-a” at the end indicates the partitive case (it is like...ummm...for the sake of convenience I am going to tell you that it is a type of direct object. If you ask me more questions about Finnish grammar I may have to start charging you 😛 ) So to one person informally, it means “have fun!” Pidä kätesi kärryillä, pidä pää kiinni ja pidä hauskaa. - Keep your hands in the car, shut your trap [lit. keep head shut] and have fun. Three different usages of the exact same verb. Told y'all you were dealing with scary stuff. Now for the plural wish, or a formal command, there is “pitäkää hauskaa”, the -kAA ending indicates the plural or formal command.
🇮🇪
I lied. One more. Because it wouldn't be right for me to exclude it. In Irish, to wish “have fun!”, say “spraoi a bheith agat!” to one person (I think this literally means “fun be to you”, and to multiple people, “agat” becomes “agaibh”. English speakers already recognize the word “spraoi”...it is where we get the word “spree” in English. Like in other languages like Hungarian or Hebrew, a preposition plus a pronoun makes a completely separate word by itself.
🍀✡️
Lastly it bears mentioning in honor of our shared holiday that Irish and Biblical Hebrew have quite a lot of grammatical overlap between them.
Have fun! (What else is there to say?)
