My brother did something similar growing up. In Swedish a common way to ask the time is "Vad är klockan?", literally translating to "What is the watch?". To which I got "An invention that tells the time" or some variation thereof for years...
I wonder how many languages' time-telling questions could be susceptible of a different literal interpretation.
It seems like the Spanish and Portuguese could be literally taken as "what are hours?" ("intervals of sixty minutes!") (although I don't think it would be the most idiomatic way to ask that question in either language), while one German option is "how late is it?" ("not very!").
There's another German question which could be taken as "how much clock is it?", but since clocks are usually discrete objects, it might be quite a strain to try to take this as a question about something's clock-nature. (Maybe if you were looking at Dalí's Persistence of Memory, you could answer something like "this one is not very much clock".)
