This is a semi-generic spelling which is apparently derived from a single German product, Lipton Ice Tea. Canoo appears to indicate that both der Ice-Tea or das Ice-Tea (genitive of both: des Ice-Teas) are possible, whereas the native German form, der Eistee, is strictly of masculine gender. It is arguable whether der Ice-Tea is a true Anglicism at all, since it appears to be Unilever's own orthographical back-formation from Eistee, which has morphological similarities to der Eiswein, die Eiskrem and so on. However it is possible that Ice-Tea (Unilever does not use a hyphen) is an Anglicism derived from iced tea (note the -d-). This topic would require research in 19th century dictionaries. Eistee is an oddity among Eis words, which generally refer to foods that have been frozen or objects found in snow, whereas Eistee is chilled, never frozen. Iced tea is so named because one ices it by pouring cold tea onto several lumps of ice in the glass. Ice-Tea (capitalized, hyphenated in standard German) is a false friend, but is redeemed from being a pseudo-Anglicism by the fact that the lost -d- is not audible and does not greatly hamper understanding for a monolingual English speaker. ... Read More
Handy, das
This is the pseudo-Anglicism par excellence, having come into use in the 1990s as the standard German term for a mobile phone. It perplexed monolingual English-speakers for nearly a decade before it dawned on Germans that this word is not English. There have been several attempts to discover the etymology of this German noun: some think das Handy derives from the model name of an early, Japanese-manufactured cellphone which was sold in Germany. Others wonder if it was not spawned by a misunderstanding when a German read some some advertising bumph about the new "handy telephones" coming onto the market. Capitalized, given neuter gender and pronounced with the German vowel -a-, it sounds to an English-speaker like "hundy". Canoo.net validates two plural spellings: die Handies and die Handys. Compound forms include die Handynummer (mobile telephone number). ... Read More
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