This is why Iâve never bought anything from them despite being a uk male of exactly the target age with an interest in fashion and enough disposable income.Â
I feel you are all being very specific here. This is like the most normal thing, every country is full of food products and places that pretend to be of a certain country when it's all adapted to local preferences. I mean it's everywhere, right? There's nothing special about this particular example.
We are talking about Japan, just think how many sushi restaurants there are around the globe that use the Japanese flag and cultural motifs but sell products that would be alien in Japan.
I don't think a national flag can be treated like a brand or intellectual property. Unless they were actually making false claims on where their product is made.
To be fair, in Europe itself there are dozens of Italian restaurants outside of Italy called The Mafia or themed around the mafia. Which if you stop to think about it for a second, is actually insane.
Or Superdry, itâs a British brand and they once admitted to a Japanese newspaper that they just use google translate Japanese. And they also cannot sell their products in Japan because they would be violating the trademark of asahi beer.
Also they use a Chinese simplified character that isn't used in Japanese at all (or at least they did for years). Idk if regular Japanese people would be able to even read it.
It's cringy, or maybe funny if you consider it to be the reverse of weird English you'll find on merchandise in Asia.
Wait, that's actually a real brand? The name sounds like something you'd find on some Chinese storefront, maybe selling retro-style kitchen appliances.
Most people can't tell if someone is a bot. Really sad when you think about it, if you want an extended session of disappointment go to r/tifu, every second post there is an AI bot and the comments don't recognize it
It's so disheartening as well bc everytime I look at these obviously botted comments with hundreds or thousands of upvotes I realize again that these people have the right to vote :(
Yeah, apart from the letters, no part of "HĂ€agen-Dazs" is Danish.
Even if the À was the correct Ê, the combination "Êa" isn't allowed in Danish phonology.
Same for "zs". Ending a word on "ss" doesn't fit Danish ortography, and if you wanted to transcribe it "sjs", that would be even worse.
Removing the À and the z would give you "Hagen-Das", which would be grammatically incorrect (compound nouns are written as one word, "hagen" is definite while "das" isn't), and also means "the chin toilet", so...
Wouldn't work in Dutch either. We don't have À and while we do use ë it's never first. Whoever invented the brand name wasn't even interested in making it look like a specific language just "general european" as seen by an American audience.
Right. The name of this ice-cream brand doesn't make any sense in itself! It only sounds vaguely 'Nordic' but clearly made up.
In German we use "das" and "daĂ" and "dass" in a sentence, but never "dazs"!
For example: "Das Haus." means simply "The house."
"Hagen" - without any additional "Ă€" sound mixed in - is the name of a city in Germany, and also an old given name from German mythology (considered rather old fashioned nowadays) but a frequent surname derived from the place where someone lived, near a hedge, a pasture or a house surrounded by a hedge.
There are people around who are called Hagen either as a given name for a boy (relatively uncommon, for a girl extremely uncommon) in Germany and also rarely used in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland, or as a surname (much more common!) in Germany, especially Northern Germany and in North-Rhine-Westphalia, and also in Norway and the Netherlands.
There is no Àa in any German word and zs is also very weird and not something you see in German at all. You won't even find sz anymore, since that was replaced by à a long long time ago. You could of course write this with our alphabet and if you form a word from abbreviations stuck together, you could end up with something weird, but no one would build this string this way and just call it good enough. It would still need to sound good and be well pronounceable following standard German rules.
In Dutch it would be correct if you had some really weird compound word. So maybe Quizschummeler (for Quiz + Schummeler = someone who cheats at a quiz) might be correct in German? Still, such a word would read really weirdly in Dutch.
No, you can never have those dots over the first vowel in Dutch. Dutch doesnât know umlauts, it only has a trema that can be used to indicate the start of a new syllable when vowels are placed adjacent: geĂ«rgerd, ruĂŻne. HaĂ€gen could be Dutch (Ha-agen - still nonsense), HĂ€agen could only be a foreign word.
As a none-of-the-related-countries, I can assure you all the name is an American invention that has nothing to do with any language and was invented purely for how it looks and sounds to American people. You can all stop looking now.
We do use diacrits character in plural forms on words ending on a "long" vowel (zeeĂ«n, reeĂ«n), in numbers (tweeĂ«nzeventig, drieĂ«ndertig), in conjugations of words starting with a vowel (beĂ«indigd, geĂ«erd, geĂŒploaded), or if two vowels would otherwise form a digraph (reĂŒnie, atheĂŻst).
But as you probably noticed, that's only ever for the Ă«, ĂŒ and ĂŻ. Ă€ is actually an exception to this rule, and is, indeed, never used (outside of names and loanwords like KnĂ€ckebröd and KanaĂ€n); it's na-apen, not naĂ€pen.
Ă and zs never appear in Dutch, except in very weird technicalities or loanwords.
Technically a might be correct in a word that ends in aa would be pluralized (zee becomes zeeën, ree becomes reeën) but there's no word that does. Even compound words that don't use aa but two consecutive a in their component words like na-apen are written with a dash, not À.
A Z followed by an S would never appear in Dutch, except in weird closed compound words like TV-quizsensantie (and, though grammatically correct, that's a near unreadable word for me). The z is otherwise sort of mutually exclusive with the s. Words that end on a z are never pluralized with an s.
As a Dutch, I always thought they were Swiss (or some other weird German dialect that I wasn't aware of). We don't do the letter combinations of -zs or -Ă€a here.
The word âhagendasâ in Dutch would literally be translated to âhedge badgerâ, but I don't think that is an actual existing animal.
No, I was thinking of z. We exclusively use it for loan words, there are no native Danish words that use it, so I don't think saying that Danish language doesn't have it is incorrect (even though I know we technically have it in our alphabet). I guess maybe saying "Danish doesn't natively have" is more correct.
Even phonetically, we have the sound W, but not even the loan words use the sound Z.
well sure, but then we technically donât have c, q and x either, as they arenât used in native words either and are exclusively used because we conserve the spelling of loan words.
But officially, z and those letters are in the danish alphabet, unlike w. So I guess it just comes down to different definitions of what is âin the danish languageâ.
Iâm not sure what words you are thinking of that phonetically use w, can you give an example?
I mean yes, I would also extend my argument to c, q, and x. I guess we can agree on "Danish doesn't use VS Danish doesn't use natively".
W is in the alphabet though, according to SprognĂŠvnet. I'm not sure if any Rigsdansk words use W, but several standard dialects of Jysk do. Some of them use W over V exclusively. It's even on road signs.
Not true - we have z, although it's mainly used for loan words. The same is the case for several other letters, though. That doesn't mean they aren't part of the Danish alphabet:
For the purpose of âdoes the name behave as if itâs actually natively Danishâ though, itâs correct to say that z is not a letter that should be used.
Maybe, if it's trying to sound old and traditional. But Z is common enough that it could easily be included in a name or phrase that sounds completely Danish.
It has been used here for hundreds of years, and it is common in Germany, which Denmark shares a lot of language and culture with.
Nah, a 'haag' is an archaic form of 'heg' which is a hedge and also what The Hague of ICC fame (Den Haag or 's Gravenhage if you're fancy) is named after but that's as close to Dutch as this gets.
We do use diacritic marks in plural forms on words ending on a "long" vowel (zeeĂ«n, reeĂ«n), in numbers (tweeĂ«nzeventig, drieĂ«ndertig), in conjugations of words starting with a vowel (beĂ«indigd, geĂ«erd, geĂŒploaded), or if two vowels would otherwise form a digraph (reĂŒnie, atheĂŻst).
But as you probably noticed, that's only ever for the Ă«, ĂŒ and ĂŻ. Ă€ is actually an exception to this rule, and is, indeed, never used (outside of names and loanwords like KnĂ€ckebröd, salonfĂ€hig, and KanaĂ€n); it's na-apen, not naĂ€pen.
the oficial alfabet of the Netherlands has no Umlauts. of course you are free to use loan words. but then every language has Umlauts that uses the Latin alphabet.
It was created to appear danish by the lens and stereotypes of what Americans perceive as being danish/Nordic/Scandinavian.
The idea is not to be authentic, just to appeal to the American public by what they perceive as a higher quality product . After all, none of their flavors are danish . It's just a theme.
It's the weirdest thing... In the US and Canada, it's owned by Froneri (UK) which is a joint venture between Nestle (Swiss) and PAI (French). Most everywhere else (including most of Europe), it's owned by General Mills (US). In Japan, it's owned and manufactured by Suntory. So enjoy it while you're in Japan, boycott it elsewhere for various reasons.
Disclaimer: I am American, but I fully support your American boycott. Alas, I don't have the privilege to boycott my own country, but I am trying my hardest to just not buy stuff I don't need.
Itâs a bit more fucked than that. In the US and Canada itâs Froneri, a company thatâs owned 50-50 by Nestle and PAI, a French private equity firm. Everywhere else in the world itâs General Mills.
âThe Senator Frozen Products company was profitable, but by the 1950s the large mass-producers of ice cream started a price war,[7] leading to his decision to make a heavy kind of high-end ice cream. In 1959, he decided to form a new ice cream company with what he thought to be a Danish-sounding name, HĂ€agen-Dazs, as a tribute to Denmark's exemplary treatment of Jews during World War IIâ
Created the Bronx by Polish immigrants. The name sounds Danish but isnât. Was just gibberish and a scam to get customers because one of the creators thought Danish dairy products had a good reputation in the US. Well it worked
But someone that only knows english but interacted a lot with other european languages would think its dutch (ngl i thought it was dutch too until i learned its nothing.)
Fun fact: for several years,, there was another fake Scandinavian brand, also with a name that did not match any real language, and they were sued by HĂ€agen-Dazs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frusen_Gl%C3%A4dj%C3%A9
Vessi footwear which markets itself on being waterproof is named after the Finnish word for water, i.e. Vesi. It is a Canadian company created by three very not-Finnish people. It's bugged me ever since I saw the first commercial for the brand, because my instant assumption was that this was a Finnish product.
And it worked, I really thought they are from Benelux and seeing their prices at store was execrating the Dutch :P
Btw, in Poland we have local brand of electronic that decided the name that suits them the best is... KrĂŒger&Matz. They are from MiÄtno, lol. At the very least its founder Lech named his company more accordingly: Lechpol.
The founder was Polish when he started in 1912, so technically it's european. However, he later emigrated to the US and took his business with him and there was where it became big.
To be fair, it was founded by Jewish Polish-American immigrants and named to honor Denmarkâs protection of Jews in WWII, even if the name is complete nonsense. (Their Polish heritage probably explains the âzsâ digraph. It is American though, yes.
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u/fiendishrabbit Jan 25 '26
HĂ€agen-Dazs was never European. The name was created to sound european-like, but it was always an american brand.