Tail of monkey and trunk of elephant

October 16, 2006 8:05 AM

The Guardian today published a list of names used around the world for the @ symbol. [reproduced inside]. Can any native speakers let me know if they take advantage to these to make intrestering/humorous/offensive email address?

The Guardians list is as follows:

Bulgarian - Majmunsko (Monkey)
Croatian - Monkey (English word)
Czech - Zavinac (Pickled Herring)
Danish - Snabel (Elephant's trunk)
Dutch - Apestaartje (Little monkey's tail)
Finnish - Kissanhnta (Cat's tail)
German - Klammeraffe (Hanging monkey)
Greek - Papaki (Little duck)
Hungarian - Kukac (Worm)
Italian - Chocciola (Snail)
Korean - Dalphaengi (Snail)
Mandarin - Xiao lao-shu (Little mouse)
Norwegian - Grisehale (Pig's tail)
Polish - Kotek (Kitten)
Russian - Sobachka (Little dog)
Spanish - Arroba (Unit of weight)
Turkish - Kulak (Ear)

I guess if i was danish, i probably go with some snabel/penis size concoction, becuase i'm not smart enough to think of anything else but I'm sure you can do a lot better

posted by handybitesize to Society & Culture (25 answers total)

They got the Polish wrong. AFAICR, it is "małpechka", or "little monkey" as per the Bulgarian. At least in Małopolska - perhaps it's a regional thing.
posted by Meatbomb at 8:26 AM on October 16, 2006

Małpeczka, oops.
posted by Meatbomb at 8:27 AM on October 16, 2006

Danish is partly wrong too. It is Snabel-a, which suggests a trunk around the a. A visual onomatopoeia I guess ;-)
posted by KimG at 8:33 AM on October 16, 2006

In Frisian, we do have the word 'at' as well, though it translates as either/or. I use this in the generic mail address of my weblog, so it translates as the sentence 'whine or whine.not'. [The Frisian word 'net' means not.]

Nobody has ever noticed this in more than five years, so the joke is on me.
posted by ijsbrand at 8:36 AM on October 16, 2006

Wow...English-speakers (at least Americans) aren't very exciting when it comes to the "at" symbol.
posted by nekton at 8:39 AM on October 16, 2006

And I was told that Klammeraffe actually meant "clip-monkey", which refers to the fact that @ looks a little like a paper clip (and a little like a monkey).
posted by handee at 8:42 AM on October 16, 2006

Do people who speak those languages actually use that word when reading out their e-mail addresses? I mean, in English we call @ the 'at symbol', but you don't say 'myname at-symbol whatever dot com'. Making funny / joke e-mail addresses based on the various terms is dependent on this.
posted by wackybrit at 8:42 AM on October 16, 2006

Response by poster: absolutley cruical wackbrit - but if you owned dawn.com you'd find it difficult not to have an alias 'guns'.

So I guess I'm not really intrested in the literal translatio, more in the phonics just like ijsbrand's response
posted by handybitesize at 8:49 AM on October 16, 2006

I used to have eliminativist @ mindless.com, but that joke probably doesn't make much sense unless you're a philosophy geek... and nobody can spell eliminativist, so it was a bit crap as mail addresses go.
posted by handee at 8:52 AM on October 16, 2006

In Korean it's often called "pig nose".
posted by defreckled at 9:22 AM on October 16, 2006

Rogers, one of the big Canadian ISPs, used to give their customers "@home.com" addresses. Lots of people would play with that: "[e-mail]" or "yourwifeisn'[e-mail]"
posted by Schlimmbesserung at 9:30 AM on October 16, 2006

I would take this list with a large grain of salt if I were you.
posted by languagehat at 9:59 AM on October 16, 2006

I used to be on Rogers, and chose an email address for my homemade music site of "[e-mail]", but then a year later Rogers dumped @home and so my address became "[e-mail]" which kind of sucked.
posted by chococat at 10:13 AM on October 16, 2006

Can you post a link to the story? I can't find it.

Also, how does one spell the english name, which sounds something like "at therat"?
posted by Four Flavors at 10:24 AM on October 16, 2006

Pedantry corner. The Italian is chiocciola, also chiocciolina.
posted by TheRaven at 11:08 AM on October 16, 2006

I know that Russians definitely say "Fyodor sobaka mail tochka ru" ("tochka" being "dot"), but the morphology makes it difficult to say anything clever (dog is in the nominative).
posted by claudius at 11:40 AM on October 16, 2006

Working with computer people in northern Poland, I've never heard kotek (kitty) or małpeczka (little monkey) even once, and neverd either of them on local or national television or radio. It's always małpa (monkey), which sounds like Mao + pah, with the accent on the first syllable. Maybe it's regional, but to me małpeczka just sounds like someone trying to be cute, or something a little girl might make up.

I've never heard małpa used in a good combination.
posted by pracowity at 12:47 PM on October 16, 2006

i don't remember the hebrew, and i'm too lazy to look it up, but the israelis use the same word for the @ as a piece of pastry that is physically similar in shape to the @
posted by naxosaxur at 2:42 PM on October 16, 2006

In Swedish it's generally "Snabel-a" like in Danish, or sometimes "attabout". I think "attabout" is from stenography maybe, as my older female relatives who used to be secretaries in their youth use that, while nobody else really does.

And yes, the full name is included when spelling out the address. So [e-mail] would be "gemmy snabel-a sweden punkt se".

I have never seen any plays on words with the @ symbol, really.
posted by gemmy at 4:56 PM on October 16, 2006

"Snabel-a" is common in Norway as well. Particularly, I believe, in Bergen and the surrounding areas. While it is possible that some people use the term "grisehale", I don't think it's very common, as I hadn't heard of it prior to this thread.
posted by klue at 7:05 PM on October 16, 2006

Response by poster: Sorry Four Flavors - it only appeared in the print edition
posted by handybitesize at 1:54 AM on October 17, 2006

I can vouch for the correctness of the Dutch one, and I'm glad to see that they included the diminutive suffix -je, which is somehow often omitted in translations while it often conveys a large part of the meaning. In my experience, "apestaartje" is seldom rendered "apestaart".

(As an aside, any fluent speaker of Dutch will surely recognize the vast gap of meaning between "bier?" and "biertje?" :) )

Two things, however, must be noted:

-Spelling: there is constant confusion, even among educated native speakers, about the inclusion or omission of the linking "n" in compund nouns. Given the mysterious ways in which the Dutch Language Union works, it is a mystery even to me whether "aap" + "staart" becomes "apestaart" or "apenstaart", and this is typically the sort of thing I have to look up to get the correct spelling. I can't do that right now, however, as the online db of the authoritative Van Dale dictionary seems to be down more often than up these days. When it comes back online, you can check for yourself for the correct variety using these two links.

Google gives apestaartje a slight edge over apenstaartje, which tells us nothing about the correct spelling, but at least it means that a lot of people are using the wrong spelling, which as I said is common with "linking n" words. Oddly enough, the Groene Boekje spelling dictionary gives only the spelling with the "n".

-Secondly, anecdotal evidence suggests that the use of "ape(n)staartje", cute as it is, is losing ground to the shorter English "at", pronounced in "proper" Dutch English as English "bet" without the "b". At least in tech-savvy circles I'm hearing "apenstaartje" less and less.

Now, to answer your question, I'm not aware of any examples of this in Dutch using either "ape(n)staartje" or "at", although I'm sure they're out there, just not very common. In any event this sort of wordplay does go on all the time, in the old "www-dot-slash-dot-dot-org" tradition: for example, the URL for the now-defunct "www.tref.nl" suggests "tref-PUNT-nl", "trefpunt" meaning "meeting point".

See also this amusing McSweeney's list of annoying-to-verbally-give-out email addresses.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 8:29 AM on October 17, 2006

Van Dale gives "apenstaartje" as well.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 10:38 AM on October 17, 2006

The Finnish version should be "Kissanhäntä", i.e. it's currently missing one a with dots in the middle and the dots in the last character. Another word is "miukumauku" or "miumau" which is sort of cutiespeech for the sound that a cat makes (miaow).

Other less widely known ones include "kanelipulla" (cinnamon bun), norsunkorva (elephant's ear), and "tööttä" - I'm not completely sure what the last one means, it's maybe a corruption of "at" and sound funny.
posted by keijo at 12:37 AM on October 18, 2006

The Norwegian name is krøllalfa (curly alpha), not "grisehale" (which I've never heard of, although I've heard some people using the Danish "snabel-a"). So it gets even more difficult to come up with puns. I've never heard any at least.
posted by mummimamma at 2:15 AM on October 18, 2006