Wie heißt das Tier?

Was für ein Schwein -Pferd -Tier ist das?  Eine Kröte?
--Danke Stephanie!

Ocean Piglets, Shield Toads and Naked Snails  (found at Babbel Language Learning Online)

by John-Erik Jordan 

Funny and bizarre German animal names

The German language is famous for some really long nouns (Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän comes to mind). This is because German nouns, verbs, prepositions and adjectives are like lego bricks; you can stick them together in almost any way to create new words that encapsulate new concepts. This gives the language a special ability to name just about anything. You could call it the German language’s lego brick-like quality, or Legosteineigenschaft (see what I just did there?).
But why does German rely on such an elaborate process to name things as simple as squirrels? When broken down into their separate components, the names of familiar animals mutate into bizarre new creatures.

The Uncanny X-Tiere

Comics are full of heroes with names like super, wonder, iron, ultra, bat or cat followed by -man, -woman, -girl or -boy. A lot of German animal names work the same way, where Tier – the word for animal – is preceded by a word describing that animal’s “super power”.

• Stinktier – stink animal (skunk)
  
• Faultier – lazy animal (sloth)
  
• Gürteltier – belt animal (armadillo)
  
• Murmeltier – mumbling animal (groundhog)
  
• Schnabeltier – beak animal (platypus)
  
• Maultier – mouth animal (mule)
  
• Trampeltier – trampling animal (bactrian camel). The verb trampeln means to trample or tread upon, whereas the noun Trampel is a clumsy oaf.
  

Sometimes suffixes get more specific than -tier, but still tend to describe the wrong animal:

• Schildkröte – shield toad (tortoise)
  
• Waschbär – wash bear (raccoon)
  
• Nacktschnecke – naked snail (slug)
  
• Fledermaus – flutter mouse (bat)
  
• Seehund – sea dog (seal)
  
• Tintenfisch – ink fish (squid)
  
• Truthahn – threatening chicken (turkey). Trut is onomatopoeic for the trut-trut-trut cluck of a turkey, but it’s also been hypothesized that the name comes from the Middle German droten which means “to threaten”.
  

No, I’m Pretty Sure That’s A Pig

Swine seem to be a popular yardstick in German animal taxonomy.

• Schweinswal – pig whale (porpoise)
  
• Seeschwein – sea pig (dugong). Not to be confused with the Seekuh, or sea cow, known in English as a manatee.
  
• Stachelschwein – spike pig (porcupine). The English word is actually just as literal; porcupine sounds a lot like “pork spine”.
  
• Wasserschwein – water pig (capybara)
  
• Meerschweinchen – ocean piglet (guinea pig). The ending -chen denotes something small. Add it to the end of Schwein and you get a little pig, or piglet. Since the stems Meer and Wasser are often interchangeable, it’s most likely that Meerschweinchen actually means little capybara.
  

Just Plain Weird

I’d like to end this list by giving one animal a category all to itself: the humble squirrel.
Eichhörnchen:

• little oak horn: Eiche (oak tree) + Horn (horn) + -chen (little)
• oak croissant: Eiche (oak tree) + Hörnchen (croissant)

alternate names:

• Eichkätzchen (regional name) and Eichkatzerl (Austria) – oak kitten

Calling a squirrel a “tree kitten” is reasonably literal, but where does “little oak horn” come from? It seems that the answer comes down to a misplaced h: Eichhörnchen comes from the Old and Middle German eichorn, which has nothing to do with oak trees or horns. In this case, the eich comes from the ancient Indo-Germanic word aig, which means agitated movement, combined with the now obsolete suffix -orn. Somewhere in history a superfluous h was added (along with the diminutive -chen ending) but the original meaning remained. Today, Hörnchen is a category of rodents that includes all squirrels, chipmunks, groundhogs, prairie dogs and flying squirrels.
Keep an eye on this spot for an upcoming post where we’ll delve deeper into the animal kingdom: branching out to birds, insects, reptiles, fishes and any other mammals we find crawling around.

Why Can't Germans Say 'Squirrel'?

Natalie Wolchover, Life's Little Mysteries Staff Writer   |   March 08, 2012 12:30pm ET 

These creatures pose difficulties for Germans. Credit: S.Cooper Digital | Shutterstock View full size image

"Squrrrrr … skraaaawl … squirruh … SQUOOW!"
As YouTube videos all but prove, Germans have a really hard time pronouncing "squirrel." After nailing the "squ-," chaos ensues.
In an episode of the British TV show "Top Gear," host Jeremy Clarkson jokingly suggested that asking people to pronounce the word would be a surefire way to identify undercover German spies. "No German, no matter how well they speak English, can say 'squirrel,'" Clarkson asserted.

Exceptions to the rule notwithstanding, why is the name of small, bushy tailed rodents so difficult for the Deutsche? [See video]
Carlos Gussenhoven, a phonologist — a linguist who studies the sounds used in different languages — at Radboud University in the Netherlands, believes the challenge lies in squirrel's syllable structure.
Linguists break words into clusters — groups of consonants that have no intervening vowels. In German, "-rl" is an end cluster, Gussenhoven explained. It comes at the end of a syllable, as in the common German name Karl, rather than forming a syllable of its own. Thus German speakers try to translate the two-syllable English word "squirrel" into the monosyllabic German sound "skwörl " in the same way that "squirm" becomes "skwörm."
But that doesn't sound quite right, and Germans know it. "Dissatisfied with this result, the German speaker tries to produce a real 'R,' of the sort you get in (Rock 'n) Roll, in the end cluster, wreaking havoc," Gussenhoven told Life's Little Mysteries.
He outlined the steps a German should take to pronounce "squirrel," and boy, does it sound like no fun.
"The solution is to say skwö first and then Roll. If the speaker then also manages to avoid saying (1) sh for [s] and (2) [v] for [w], and uses the vowel in the first syllable of getan  [German for 'done']  instead of (3)ö in the first syllable and instead of (4) o in the second syllable, and (5) makes the r like the English r and (6) the l like the 'dark' l of English, the result will be quite acceptable," he wrote in an email.
No wonder it's so difficult for Germans to nail the English name. Gussenhoven said "squirrel" is a shibboleth, a word notorious for the way its pronunciation identifies its speaker as a foreigner. [Why Do Americans and Brits Have Different Accents?]
Jessica Williams, a linguist at the University of Illinois in Chicago who studies second language acquisition, said that, based on YouTube, the issue may not be confined to Germans. "I notice that there are plenty of other videos that say the same thing about Arabic and Farsi speakers," she said.

Go on, then, native English speakers: Say "squirrel" and be proud.
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OK then, everyone.  Some of us "Amis" have our own troubles pronouncing the German word for "squirrel."   Give it a try:  "Eichhörnchen!"   (Literally:  little oak horn.)